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GNU Octave Gets a GUI
jones_supa writes "GNU Octave — the open source numerical computation suite compatible with MATLAB — is doing very well. The new 3.8 release is a big change, as it brings a graphical user interface, a feature which has long been requested by users. It is peppered with OpenGL acceleration and uses the super fast FLTK toolkit for widgets. The CLI interface still remains available and GNUplot is used as a fallback in cases where OpenGL or FLTK support is not available. Other changes to Octave 3.8 are support for nested functions with scoping rules, limited support for named exceptions, new regular expressions, a TeX parser for the FLTK toolkit, overhauls to many of the m-files, function rewrites, and numerous other changes and bug fixes."
In the past year, I've never seen a time when Mathworks wasn't hiring hundreds of people. They even run sponsorships (read: ads) on NPR all the time about how many jobs they have.
How does Octave or any other open source tool hold up against something with so many resources behind it?
I'm asking honestly. I know Apache and Firefox certainly do pretty well, but the former has a huge business community using it, and the latter has an enormous consumer user base. How do smaller projects compare to big software tools? For example, isn't it generally understood among graphic artists that Gimp doesn't measure up to Photoshop?
...but does it run linux?
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
Scilab is far better and always had native 3D graphics, a GUI and a simulation engine: scicos/xcos. It atonishes me that it is systematically ignored. Is it because is french?
Can someone from the numerical world explain to me what the added value is of Octave over Python with its numerical libraries?
There are numerous interactive python consoles out there that have the same ease of use as the Matlab CLI had back when I used that.
It seems to be much easier to compile a FORTRAN or C++ library to library than can be used by Python code.
Also, performance-wise Octave has always been a bit disappointing, wasn't it?
Do you mean "C'est la vie"?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
...is to keep vendors of commercial, closed-source software honest. Do you think Microsoft IIS would be half as good as it is if Apache and nginx weren't perfectly capable of doing the same job, for free and with the source code open to anyone? Come on. Octave will hopefully do the same for MATLAB.
Finding God in a Dog
As someone who does science with Octave, I disagree.
My blog, if you're interested: http://www.purp
.. but Matplotlib + iPython Notebook + Pandas is worth a look, for those trying to escape "Matlab Prison"
This is ridiculous. Why do we need some fancy GUI nonsense?
If this breaks the backwards-compatibility with my trusty CDC 405 punch card reader, I'm taking my custom elsewhere!
I have the complete Adobe suite. I use Gimp more often. Photoshop, like MS Office, is the de facto file exchange format in certain fields. Photoshop is also much slower than Gimp and in my opinion harder to use, hiding commonly used tools like rectangular selection underneath other tools.
Neither is BETTER in an absolute sense. Most professional software engineers use/used C. That doesn't make C better than JavaScript.
Personally I switched from Matlab to python with spyder as the GUI interface and I'll never look back.
Whenever there's a comparison between an open source product and a proprietary somebody always brings up the statement that "GIMP" is inferior to Photoshop like it's the "incontestable, revealed by Jesus Christ himself, truth" without *any* kind of supporting evidence.
The Toe, I don't hold you personally accountable for repeating what's become a cultural FUD meme, but I do feel that somebody has got to set the record straight here.
I would not consider myself an expert on image manipulation software, but I would consider myself competent enough to detect the stench of bullshit when it's spoken. I would very much like to see someone provide a valid metric for comparing Photoshop vs. GIMP and then proceed to provide real, valid data that either demonstrates that GIMP really is "inferior" to Photoshop or there's no real difference or that comparing the 2 products is inappropriate because they have different uses.
Examples of bullshit metrics would be something like "has to support Photoshop plugins", or "has to have an interface like Photoshop" because that's not comparing capability, but comparing preference.
Mathematica replacement.
http://www.mathics.org/
You are welcome.
it has one ALREADY
I have been using Qtoctave for a VERY long time
the current in SUISE12.3
---
Repository: Packman Repository
Name: qtoctave
Version: 0.10.1-2.28
Arch: x86_64
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
I would not consider myself an expert on image manipulation software, but I would consider myself competent enough to detect the stench of bullshit when it's spoken. I would very much like to see someone provide a valid metric for comparing Photoshop vs. GIMP..
Good luck with that quest.
Just before Christmas, I did some graphics work for a customer, and most of the 'grunt' work was dome in Gimp (and yes, I have fully licensed copies of CS4 and CS5 at my disposal).
It's just another tool, and I use it when I need it. (I know of other 'professional' graphics artists who still use PSP)
(Just for completeness, the final output design for this project was generated via Coreldraw X5).
From experience, when doing my thesis:
For my thesis, I had to implement something (DSP) which was part of my advisor's doctorate. This entailed computing a whole lot of constants for a FIR filter. My advisor had implemented this using symbolic computation, which apparently worked up to MATLAB 2007, but not any more on more recent versions. When I tried his code on the school computers, I got no answers, or the code kept on running, so I could not obtain implementation constants for this filter.
Well, symbolic computation did not work either on Octave, but I could install it on all my computers, so I did not need to either buy a version, run with an illegal version or only do my computations in school.
I solved the problem, by the way, using convolution, which was much faster, and always worked.
I suppose that the main reason for people using MATLAB professionally, is in the more advanced tools which are built on top of the basic layer, like Simulink and model-based design, which are missing in Octave. Anyone know how SciLab stacks up in this region against MATLAB?
I used Photoshop a long time ago on Macintoshes. It was supremely intuitive to use. GIMP today is much worse than Photoshop of old. I've recently paid the Adobe tax (wife has a business that requires it) and the new Photoshop is a nightmare. Current versions of GIMP and Photoshop are both non intuitive and break the expected select/act behavior.
The same is true of illustrator. The current interface is very unclear. I purchased a book to get past the initial confusion.
I don't understand the rationale. They don't explain it. The manuals should perhaps start with a "Look it works like this and here's why" section. It's so much easier to follow the logic of a UI when you understand what the rationale is.
Of course it could just be bad design.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Um, I do.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Ouch, GIMP is a usability disaster since they separated Save As and Export. I use Save As, every. single. time. And then realize it's wrong every. single. time. I am unable to override decades of muscle memory, even if I consciously know I should not use Save As in GIMP.
Photoshop is only considered usable because people train themselves to use it. For someone who does use Photoshop often, trust me, its user interface is bizarre, unintuitive, and just plain wacky. It's like WordPerfect 5.1 in the way you have to just memorize how to do things. Then the user interface makes perfect sense, because you've trained yourself in how it works. It seems obvious if you've practiced and use it all the time.
JASC Paint Shop Pro, up to version 9 before it was sold to Corel, was the only intuitive graphics program I've ever seen. It had one flaw which is why I never use it any more: You can't resize the selection rectangle.
Corel PhotoPaint used to be good, too, except it was slow, slow, slow, slow, slow.
The cost of using Gimp is not really zero. At least, if you are coming from a Photoshop background. You have to invest some time (surprisingly little!) in getting to know the software. It is, however, very capable software and the out-of-pocket cost is nil. It may be that investing some time is a good business proposition. It has been for me, as an independent graphics artist.
I find Gimp to be a very capable application. My workflow isn't, in any way, hampered by choosing Gimp in stead of Photoshop. Yes, that took some time, and at times it was a steep learning curve. But I wouldn't go back to Photoshop for the kind of projects I do. I'd feel cramped if I'd have to.
Show us. Serious request. I'm genuinely curious what Octave can do.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Examples of bullshit metrics would be something like "has to support Photoshop plugins"
Would "has to support industry-standard, proprietary plugins A, B, and C, which are critical in my company's field of work and whose developers refuse to take our money for a port to GIMP" be more honest?
I'd be interested in seeing the GUI and seeing if it is good enough to stop using Xoctave, which gives it a MATLAB-like interface. Xoctave is nice, but pricey, which is why I am still using the free beta version.
Two examples of things I've done in the past and am currently doing:
- count points on elliptic and hyper elliptic curves on a distributed parallel system for cryptography research
- simulating electric motor magnetic fields, forces and temperatures on said parallel system
My blog, if you're interested: http://www.purp
Never used Manga Studio. Is it useful for non Manga things? God I need a decent bitmap manipulation package. Photoshop isn't it.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
There does exist at least one GUI front-end for it (qtoctave), but development stopped a while back and it wasn't an official part of Octave itself.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
it would be interesting to see how many people that get paid to do graphics, and have legit copies of Photoshop, keep the Gimp or other free and open source tools on their workstations, and use them at least for some work. I don't know what the percentage would be in the arts, but if its anything like the situation with math or science programs, it's at least in the double digits, and I wouldn't be surprised if its near half.
Who is John Cabal?
Using OSX 10.6.8. ./configure ; make
Downloaded,
Got an error in "stdio.h"
Hmmm. Maybe there's a reason this hasn't been announced.
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
I'm a bit surprised to find that, 60 comments in, nobody's yet suggested R , e.g. http://cran.r-project.org/ as an alternative. There are several different GUIs available for R (Rstudio, Rcommander, Rjava,...), it's 100% opensource, and frankly most of us R users find the syntax and flexibility to be far better than MatLab. And the graphics have to be seen to be believed. You can do anything and then some.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Ignoring that I haven't finished downloading jdk-7u45 yet,
setenv LLVM_LIBS /usr/lib/ocaml # this is wrong /usr/bin /usr/lib/qt3/:/usr/include/qt3 ./configure --disable-extra-warning-flags --with-ccolamd-includedir=/usr/include/suitesparse --with-ccolamd-libdir=/usr/lib --with-camd-includedir=/usr/include/suitesparse/:/usr/include/w32api/:/usr/bin --with-camd-libdir=/usr/lib/:/usr/lib/w32api --with-cxsparse-includedir=/usr/lib/w32api --with-cxsparse-libdir=/usr/lib/w32api --with-curl-includedir=/usr/lib --with-curl-libdir=/usr/include/curl --with-glpk-includedir=/usr/include --with-glpk-libdir=/usr/lib --with-amd-includedir=/usr/include/suitesparse --with-amd-libdir=/usr/lib --with-colamd-includedir=/usr/include/suitesparse --with-colamd-libdir=/usr/lib --with-umfpack-includedir=/usr/include/suitesparse --with-umfpack-libdir=/usr/lib --with-qrupdate-includedir=/usr/lib --with-qrupdate-libdir=/usr/lib --with-fltk-prefix=/usr/bin --with-fltk-exec-prefix=/usr/bin --with-arpack-includedir=/usr/bin --with-arpack-libdir=/usr/lib >&! log.configure &
setenv LLVM_CONFIG
setenv QT_LIB
mostly works with Cygwin on Windows 7 after downloading an insane number of non-default packages (hellooooo dependencies!). This gets it down to
configure: WARNING: Missing LLVM file TargetData.h. JIT compiler is disabled.
configure: WARNING: No javac compiler or jar executable found. Octave will not be able to call Java methods.
configure: WARNING: Found nth_element broken in g++ 4.8.2. Attempting to repair by using local patched version of bits/stl_algo.h.
configure: WARNING: Missing LLVM file TargetData.h. JIT compiler is disabled.
configure: WARNING: No javac compiler or jar executable found. Octave will not be able to call Java methods.
After the jdk download finishes, that should take care of most of the remaining issues. Now to waste time watching TV while make does it magic... For you young people, TV is like an older, bigger iPad that receives free through the airwaves--the way nature intended it--programs and movies.
Spyder is awesome! Also liking Pyzo a lot.
I no longer use MATLAB for my own stuff, but my job is hooked on it, so at work I'm mostly in MATLAB.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Well, Mathematica is now free for non-commercial use on the Raspberry Pi of all things.
You could run a Raspberry emulator and run it inside that on other operating systems. But I haven't looked at the license agreement so maybe that's explicitly prohibited.
No idea how it performs, but the screenshots at Wolfram look promising.
G.
From experience, when doing my thesis: ...
Well, symbolic computation did not work either on Octave...
Did you try sympy? I was amazed recently how well it works -- you can start with certain assumptions and derive formulas/equations from them, output latex, and finally evaluate the equations, for instance for matplotlib plotting. Then you can change your assumptions and rederive new equations / plots.
Of course it depends what kind of math you do.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Hey, give him a break. French is "so complicated no one can figure it out" too, apparently!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
R is for statistics. Octave is for linear algebra.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
That's (mostly) true, but a lot of people tend to use MATLAB for data collection, manipulation and analysis. R is a much more powerful tool (and easier to use in my opinion) than MATLAB for this purpose, so it probably deserves a mention. The plotting with ggplot is also just gorgeous! For neuroimaging, I am happily moving away from MATLAB to a combination of R, Arduino code and Python, although the psychtoolbox still has a warm spot in my heart!
> quite good if you plan on inking)
"inking" is just a fancy word for tracing. See:
COLLECTOR: So you draw this! .ink it'!
BANKY: (signing the comic)
I ink it and I'm also the colorist.
The guy next to me draws it. But we
both came up with the characters,
COLLECTOR: What's that mean - you
BANKY: Well. It means that Holden draws the
pictures in pencil, and then he gives
it to me to go over in ink
COLLECTOR: So you just trace!
Banky freezes up. He composes himself and continues
signing.
BANKY: It's not tracing. I add depth and
shading to give the image mere
definition. Only then does the drawing
really take shape.
COLLECTOR: You go over what he draws with a pen -
that's tracing.
BANKY: (hands book back to
Collector)
Not really.
(calling out)
Next!
A LITTLE KID steps up but the Collector lingers.
COLLECTOR: Hey man. If somebody draws something
and then you draw the same thing right
on top of it, not going out-side the
designated original art what do call
that!
LITTLE KID: (shrugs)
I don't know. Tracing?
COLLECTOR: (to Banky) See?
BANKY: It's not tracing.
COLLECTOR: Oh, but it is.
BANKY: (to Little Kid) Do you want Lour book signed or what?
COLLECTOR: Hey - don't get all testy with him
just because you have a problem with
your station in life.
BANKY: I'm secure with what I do.
COLLECTOR: Then say it - you're a tracer.
BANKY: (grabbing Little Kid's book)
How should I sign this?
LITTLE KID: (grabs book back) I don't want you to sign it, I want the guy that draws Bluntman and Chronic to sign it. You're just a tracer.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Speaking as someone who uses these kinds of programs mainly for drawing/painting, GIMP is useless to me; I've yet to find a way to rotate/flip the viewport (not the image itself), save as/export issues as you've mentioned, no easy way to configure some necessary shortcuts (though it's been some months since I've used it, so I may be misremembering or it may have changed), the number bars for brush size, etc. are fucking awful, etc.
You can't find viewport adjustment because it doesn't exist; GIMP is oriented toward image manipulation, not creation. Using GIMP or Photoshop as a drawing tool is a case of forcing the tool to be used in ways it wasn't originally intended, and unlike Photoshop, GIMP doesn't have the development resources for adding those sorts of things.
What you should really be using is Krita, which lives somewhere between the extremes of GIMP and MyPaint. It isn't as powerful for editing as GIMP is, but it still has various editing tools, while still being focused on creation tools.
Some interesting Krita features:
* Non-destructive (i.e. viewpoint only) canvas rotation.
* Non-destructive mirroring of the canvas.
* Multiple viewports of the same canvas with independent zoom, mirroring, rotation.
* Different layer types, including paint, vector, and filter.
* Layer grouping.
* Filter layers can be applied to either a single layer or a layer group, modifying the composite of the group's layers.
* These Filters are non-destructive: they can be added or removed, and the layer(s) they affect can be edited while they're in use.
* An excellent pop-up colour and brush selector. The centre is a normal colour selector, the middle ring lists the last twelve used colours, and the outer ring has ten brushes of your choice.
* Multiple brush engines, all very flexible. The normal pixel brush engine is powerful by itself, but there is also a colour smudge brush for smooth blending (not mixing), a brush that emulates the harmony brushes, another that emulates Alchemy's shape brush, and "deform brush" that can nudge and move strokes on the canvas.
* An editable perspective grid. Brush strokes can be forced to follow it for striaght, accurate lines.
* Pseudo-infinite canvas. The canvas is finite, but when you scroll past the edge, an arrow appears; click it and the canvas extends in that direction. Not as nice as MyPaint, but still better than using a resize UI for quick extending.
* Sessions. You can set up different UI layouts and change them on-the-fly with a click.
* Different colour and shade selectors available, including the MyPaint one.
* CMYK, RGB, and other colour models available, as well as varying bit depths
I've done beam-forming coefficient calculations in it...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Whenever there's a comparison between an open source product and a proprietary somebody always brings up the statement that "GIMP" is inferior to Photoshop like it's the "incontestable, revealed by Jesus Christ himself, truth" without *any* kind of supporting evidence.
Whenever someone comes up with a comment like yours, the easy answer is always CMYK. Gimp doesn't support it.
And that's just the most obvious problem.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
R has everything I need for linear algebra.
I love the graphics on R as well. Matlab always looks too computer-y for me. However, the thing I love the most about R is that not only is it free and top-notch quality, but I run it on my Windows box, linux box, for giggles I've loaded it on Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi, and if I ever get around to rooting my phone, I could even load it on there as well. No license files.
With regard to Octave, when I've been given m-files, I've found Octave to be a very good substitute for Matlab.
Those who're interested in Matlab alternatives would be well served to check out Julia.
It's a very clean language and has very good (LLVM based) performance!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Linus used Minix to write Linux. His motivations included pure geek fun, 32 bit support, and the ability to modify and distribute. Minix was free of charge, but not 100% freedom. You weren't allowed to modify Minix and distribute your own version. At the time, BSD included code written and controlled by AT&T.
http://www.learnlinux.ie/content/linus-torvalds-original-announcement-usenet
Not perfect, but could be sufficient for some use cases.
When you say it like that, it sounds perfectly adequate.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What a strange question. Octave has quite an enormous userbase, perhaps not as big as R but with a heritage going back to the 1980s.
The real question is what can't you do in Octave that you'd do in Matlab: it's been quite some years since I used either, but I did have to port my Matlab code to use different or missing toolboxes so that it would run on Octave. The other big problem is a complete lack of integration with data/signal acquisition hardware which has drivers for Matlab (up to a crusty old version you've probably just retired)...
I use Octave and totally ignore Matlab compatibility. This enables me to use the (IMO vastly superior) Octave syntax additions. On the odd occasion I need to go back to Matlab, I find the syntax incredibly restrictive. Small things like ++i, default parameters, and temporary expressions, all of which make life so much easier. I understand why this situation exists, but I think it's a terrible shame.
Then there's Octave's ASCII format for storing structures and multidimensional (>2 dim) arrays. That single feature alone is why I don't use Matlab.
For what it's worth, I rarely use either program
This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that you have no clue what you're talking about.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I've tried the switch from MATLAB to Python. I wanted to love Python, but there was just too much screwing around. No one plotting package fulfilled all of my needs, so I had learn multiple packages. One or two of those were a pain to install (particularly on a Mac) and I wasted ages on that. The OO was nice, I must say, but writing fast MATLAB code is easier for me (habit, mainly) than writing fast Numpy/Scipy code. I certainly learned a lot by figuring out how to speed up the Python code, and quite likely gaining this sort of experience is useful, but none of it helped me get my work done. I made a few nice little analysis toys in Python then went back to MATLAB. When all your colleagues use MATLAB and you already have a large suite of functions you've written, then it's hard to justify switching it all to Python.
soylentnews.org
R is wonderful for statistics, I use it often for that, but as a programming language it's slow and bloody awful. If you have a lot of elaborate data pre-processing to do, such as filtering signals, identifying events in time course data, image processing, etc, then R isn't the way forward. Best approach is to use something more general-purpose to extract the descriptive statistics, then export to R to fit the models.
soylentnews.org