Faculty nearly converted to use octave : help needed

[Nicolas Pettiaux]

Dear

I have today held a speech at the Université libre de Bruxelles, in
the faculty of applied sciences where I contribute to the teaching on
numerical analysis (NA).

Most people agreed that it makes sense to teach the basis of NA with
octave instead of matlab
but wanted some more info and ansers before making the final decision.

Q1: What about the partial differential equation solvers in octave and
especially, is there a function in octave similar to pdepe (partial
differential equation parabolic expansion, if I remember correctly) ?

Q2: today, it is not possible to use the interactive zoom features
with the version of gnuplot 4.0.0 and octave 2.1.73 in Ubuntu Feisty
or Mac OS X 10.4.9, while it works on Microsoft Windows.
I found one thread about the case in the ML archive in
http://www.nabble.com/forge-functions-not-working-and-zoom-t3554207.html
.
I have been asked if I had any idea what needs to be done and when
this could be resolved, but as I do not have any idea, I relay the
question.

Q3: which is the simplest way to install all the toolboxes from
octave-forge, described in http://octave.sourceforge.net/packages.html
and to have a full documentation installed locally about these , to
equip easily our computer teaching labs ? (i have found how to load
one packages at a time but not yet all of them at once). This question
is essentially for Ubuntu (but also for Windows and Mac OS X)

I wil now have to collect the other requests and use cases from my
colleagues and, I suppose that I'll have to get back to the list, to
help to push further octave in the University.

Much thanks in advance,

Nicolas



--
Nicolas Pettiaux - email: address@hidden
Utiliser des formats ouverts et des logiciels libres - http://passeralinux.org