Downloading Octave

Latest Release

There are several different versions of Octave available for download:

stable: This version is well tested, reliable, but also quite old and no longer maintained.
testing: A recent snapshot of the development sources that has been selected as being reasonably good. Most people who are not actively involved in Octave's development will want to use this version.
development: The most recent snapshot of the development sources. Use this if you want the latest features and it doesn't bother you that you might run into a few problems (if you do, please report them). If you are interested in up-to-the-minute changes, you may use the sources from the public CVS archive instead (see below for details).

Download links for Octave
Octave version	Version	Release Date
Stable (also currently ancient and obsolete)	2.0.17 (.tar.gz) (.tar.bz2)	12 Apr 2002
Testing (you probably want this)	2.1.73 (.tar.gz) (.tar.bz2)	22 Mar 2006
Development (latest features, but expect a few rough spots)	2.9.9 (.tar.gz) (.tar.bz2)	2 Oct 2006

Contributed Packages

A collection of contributed packages for Octave is available from http://octave.sf.net.

Binaries

Linux

Binaries for Linux distributions are generally available with the distribution (Debian, SuSE, RedHat, and others have packages).

Mac OS X

There are several choices for OS X binaries:

Mac OS X High Performance Computing
DarwinPorts package management system
The Fink project currently only has an old version of Octave available.

Windows

If you have cygwin, then look in the Math category for the most recent Cygwin package of Octave, available from www.cygwin.com.
If you do not have cygwin (you will most likely know if you have it), download the most recent version of octave-forge-windows from Octave-Forge Files. WARNING: do not install this package if you have cygwin installed

OS/2 or eComStation

Dmitry Froloff has built OS/2 binaries that are available at http://froloff.homeip.net/.

FTP Mirror Sites

If you have trouble transferring Octave from this site, you might try one of those listed below. They mirror the files from ftp://ftp.octave.org/pub/octave.

http://ftp.eos.hokudai.ac.jp/pub/GNU/misc/octave
http://ftp.math.uni-hamburg.de/pub/soft/math/octave
http://ftp.u-aizu.ac.jp/pub/SciEng/numanal/Octave

GNU Project FTP Site

The latest stable release of the Octave sources may also be found on the official Free Software Foundation ftp site, ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu, which is also mirrored on many sites around the world.

Anonymous CVS

The latest development sources of Octave are also available via anonymous access to a read-only CVS archive. There are also web interfaces to the archive available at http://www.octave.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi and. http://www.octave.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi.

If you decide to use the development sources from the CVS archive, please read the file ftp://ftp.octave.org/pub/octave/bleeding-edge/README.

Assuming you have CVS and ssh installed on your machine you may check out the latest development version of Octave sources with the following sequence of commands:

Set CVS_RSH in your environment to

ssh

Set CVSROOT in your environment to

:ext:anoncvs@www.octave.org:/cvs

Or alternately add

-d :ext:anoncvs@www.octave.org:/cvs

in the CVS commands below (place it immediately after cvs, before any other CVS arguments).

Issue the command

cvs -z 9 checkout octave

to check out the all of the current development sources for Octave.

Once you've got the repository checked out, cvs update will sync your local copy with the repository. See the CVS manual for additional information on how to use CVS.