Hi Vitaly: On Sunday 12 August 2001 04:14 pm, you wrote:

Then:

on Celeron-333@500MHz, SuSE 7.2

Octave 2.0.16 : 70.0 secs

MATLAB 5.3 : 4.0 secs

Octave slow run time is due to the fact that it does not have ATLAS linked libraries. At least that is what I am told. The relevant info is from John Eaton creator of Octave: From: "John W. Eaton" | please suggest how I might improve execution speeds for Octave, especially | under Linux? | | The tests I ran were: | | tic;A=rand(20,20000);B=svd(A);toc <snip> I believe all of these operations involve calls to lapack and/or blas libraries. If you use a recent development version of Octave linked with the atlas libraries, then you will probably see some improvement. jwe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Further info on Octave is at: http://www.octave.org/ Old habits die hard. Too many folks use their Linux boxes in the same way they would a Windows machine. There is no reason not to run *MANY* Octaves at the same time. Since: a) Linux is truly multitasking and b) there is no "site" license for Octave. If one Octave session is taking a while to compute, minimize the Xterm and start another one. It is perfectly feasible to have four or more Octaves running at the same time. Furthermore you can run Octave inside EMACS, on SuSE. Do M-x run-octave. The idea here is you can login at another virtual console and do emacs -nw, and then run Octave.

dont think it's a good reason to compare these two systems. i never used OCTAVE and i wonder -- how well is it compatible with MATLAB 5 (at least)

It is very compatible with MatLab. Many commands are "cognates" or exactly the same. The foo.m files use almost the same syntax. Here is a simple example: function r = dist(x,y) r = sqrt(x*x + y*y); endfunction For the benefit of the other SuSE users, it should be mentioned that MatLab, for non-students, costs a bankrupting $1730.00 (this is not a typo!). Why I could buy a second AMD equipped computer and run dozens of Octaves at the same time with SuSE at that price. -- Cheers, Jonathan