* Linux/GNU/Un$x/Mac OS X+X11 install
Installation is pretty basic. Assuming you have a reasonable system setup, the following should work. Also note that the following explanation refers to version 1.0 ; for newer versions simply substitute 1.0 with the new version number.
First unpack the source tar file
tar xvfz FreeMat-1.0.tar.gz
or using
gunzip FreeMat-1.0.tar.gz
tar -xvf FreeMat-1.0.tar
This will create a new directory FreeMat-1.0 containing all the FreeMat files. Next, we make a build directory under the FreeMat-1.0 source directory.
cd FreeMat-1.0
mkdir build
cd build
Now, we run configure (use configure -help for more options) :
../configure --prefix=<mydir>
where <mydir> is the directory under which FreeMat will be installed. The default directory is /usr/local but this requires administrator privileges. The simplest solution is to use your own home directory, such as:
../configure --prefix=/home/username
In this case, FreeMat will be installed in /home/username/share/FreeMat. Then, staying inside the build directory, perform a make and a make install:
make
make install
There are two post-build steps you must still (manually) perform.
Add a FREEMAT_PATH environment variable to your startup
files that includes /home/username/share/FreeMat/MFiles
For example, with tcsh/csh, the following line would be added to the .cshrc
setenv FREEMAT_PATH /home/username/share/FreeMat/MFiles:/home/username/myMFiles
or in bashrc for bash:
declare -x "FREEMAT_PATH=/home/username/share/FreeMat/MFiles:/home/username/myMFiles"
It is not necessary to add the "." directory to the search path, as it is automatically searched by FreeMat.
Note also that FreeMat uses BLAS as part of its matrix manipulation routines. During the configure process, FreeMat will attempt to find an optimized BLAS. If it fails, you can either specify a location using the --with-blas option to configure, or use the provided blas using the --with-miniblas option. This should be used as a last resort. It is an unoptimized version that will generally result in less than ideal performance of FreeMat. I recommend the ATLAS project (math-atlas.sourceforge.net) to generate an automatically tuned set of BLAS routines for your specific machine.
After installation, an HTML version of the manual is available by pointing a web browser to /home/username/share/FreeMat/html/index.html.
Note: On Mac OS X, you will need to install g77 and libjpeg, libpng and libtif. I suggest using fink (fink.sourceforge.net). Perhaps at some point in the future a fink package will be available for the Mac (volunteers?).