Most of the time, installing things with MacPorts is pretty easy; however, I have found that GNU Octave can be a little tricky. That being said, it’s still pretty easy to get Octave up and running in both Snow Leopard and Lion.
At the time of this post, here’s two version of Octave to choose from: octave (version 3.2.4) and octave-devel (version 3.4.3). For my money, I like octave-devel. In my brief testing with the two, the biggest difference for me was that the graphs plotted in octave-devel looked more like their OS counterparts. With octave, I found the scaling of elements on the graph to be different sizes and that bugged me.
To install Octave, run the following from the terminal:
sudo port install octave-devel +gcc45
And then wait…as there are a lot of things that need being compiled.
I added the gcc45 variant because one of the dependencies, atlas, needs gcc45 to compile. This ensures that both of those are in sync.
Feel free to add other variants if you like, like X11 support or offline documentation. To get a full list, run:
port variants octave-devel