Octave for Android

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Revision as of 06:15, 19 February 2021 by Archisman (talk | contribs) (fix spelling, and more info about VNC server.)
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Termux

Termux is a Terminal Emulator for Android. You can install it from Play store or F-Droid. You don't need a rooted device to use Octave with Termux.

Direct Octave installation

You can directly install Octave in Termux using the repository by its-pointless.

wget https://its-pointless.github.io/setup-pointless-repo.sh
sh setup-pointless-repo.sh
apt install octave

However, graphics capabilities are not available with this approach. It would only plot with ASCII characters in the terminal.

Via some Linux distribution

Inside Termux in Android, you can install a Linux distribution like Debian, Ubuntu, Arch or Alpine. Note that Alpine consumes relatively less disk space. Octave can be installed as described in Octave for GNU/Linux from the distribution's respective package manager.

To use Octave's graphical capabilities, the installation of a desktop environment and the usage of a VNC Server is required. On many android devices, only the graphics toolkit "gnuplot" is known to work. Several apps (e.g. Anlinux, Andronix) are available to easily install the Linux distribution of your choice, and setting up the desktop environment. Refer to the Andronix docs for an overview of setting up the VNC server.

GNURoot Octave

The Android app GNURoot Octave in the Google play store is built and maintained by Corbin Champion. However, note that these repositories have not been updated for several years. It is not part of the GNU Octave project. Thus please use the following GitHub pages for questions and bug reports:

The implementation has been done in close cooperation with the Octave developers and makes use of the Octave source code without essential changes. Thus, it is fully compatible with the versions of Octave on other platforms.

Some probably outdated build instructions for the older "octave4android" app: