Rasperry Pi
Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV/Monitor and a keyboard. (see FAQ)
octave on Raspbian
The recommended OS is Raspbian “wheezy” and there are ready to use octave packages for that. You can check the available version with "apt-cache policy". As of 9.Jan 2013 this was:
$ apt-cache policy octave octave: Installed: (none) Candidate: 3.6.2-5 Version table: 3.6.2-5 0 500 http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ wheezy/main armhf Packages
Installing octave is really easy:
$ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install octave
This will take some time to download (approx. 29MB) and install octave and all of its needed dependencies. After this there is an entry "Programming" - "GNU Octave" in your LXDE menu.
octave-forge packages on Raspbian
If you type
$ apt-cache search octave-
you will see a lot of additional octave forge packages, for example
octave-control - control functions for Octave from Octave-Forge
Just install it with apt-get:
$ sudo apt-get install octave-control