Jens Nöckel's Homepage

Computer notes home

Installing software

This page is quite outdated (last update was in 2004). More recent information is linked from the main menu page.

If you installed octave as I have described before, then you already have some other additional software that came with it, such as
f2c, fftw, fort77, gnuplot
To see what you've got, type fink list
and look for entries that are marked with an 'i' for installed. You could also just type fink list | grep ' i '
to find installed packages and fink list | grep '(i)'
to find packages that could need updating. Updating is done by fink update ...
or, to update everything, by fink update-all
To get more information on a package, say f2c, type fink describe f2c
or fink info f2c

General utilities and fixes

Emulating a three-button mouse

Of course, for UNIX applications you need the right and middle mouse button sometimes. Wthout a three-button mouse, use the Control or Option keys with the mouse to emulate these buttons.

File compression and decompression

There is a problem with Stuffit Expander 8.02 which is installed on my OS 10.3 machine. The utility doesn't properly decompress some archives, in particular Mathematica notebooks compressed with gzip. In the Finder, I therefore don't double-click on .gz files to open them with Stuffit Expander. Instead, right-click on the .gz file and choose "On My Command" from the contextual menu, then select the gunzip uncompression from there.

Numerics, visualization

fink install python
fink install scilab
fink install gsl
The Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) is a comprehensive numerical library for use in C. One thing that it cannot do is Bessel functions with complex arguments (even IMSL can't do that, but NAGlib can). Octave is one of the few programming environments that can handle this particular thing, but it has fewer special functions built in than the GSL. So in general it's good to have all these installed and take your pick depending on the circumstances...
fink install pgplot
fink install povray
fink install imagemagick
fink install gimp
fink install skencil
These are all things I found useful. For graphics, I mostly use a commercial program, Adobe Illustrator. For my programming, I also use commercial products - Absoft FORTRAN on MacOSX, e.g. But I have found the g77 and cc compilers from GNU to be very good when combined with the BLAS and LAPACK that octave-atlas installs.

Office and text processing