I am taking Andrew Ng’s Stanford Machine Learning Class. It is required to install octave for the class assignments.

For the benefit of everyone, I want to type out all the steps I took to install octave on my osx El Capitan. Certainly you could just download the pre-built binary at the official octave site, but only if your internet connection is fast and stable. I am taking the homebrew path.

Oh… you have Xcode right??? Um… if not, install it first at the Mac App Store. Be warned Xcode is quite large and will take some time to install… ^^;

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install Homebrew http://brew.sh/

/usr/bin/ruby -e “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

tap the science formulae

brew tap homebrew/science

update/upgrade brew

brew update && brew upgrade

install gcc, this will take like an hour to compile…

brew install gcc

install xquartz

brew install Caskroom/cask/xquartz

install octave

brew install octave

install fltk for gnuplot

brew install fltk

fix fontconfig

brew uninstall fontconfig brew install fontconfig –universal

install gnuplot

brew install gnuplot

optional: if you don’t want to use xquartz, you can use qt

brew uninstall gnuplot brew install gnuplot –with-qt `

Then you could run octave by issuing octave in your terminal.

ref: - https://adampash.com/how-to-install-octave/ - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35249881/octave-fontconfig-error