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This page is quite outdated (last update was in 2004).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