GNU Octave "is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations". GNU Octave 2.x, although very useful, used to be slow. What about now, when there is Octave 3.2?

Arch Linux, which was inspired by the CRUX is an i686 optimized lightweight distribution with a great package management tool. Arch releases usually contain a core cd image (~160 MB) that has a core system without any graphical servers and an FTP install image (~30 MB) with which you can install the entire OS from an FTP server.

This week’s FLOSS4Science interview is with Jesper Schmidt Hansen, nanofluidics scientist and author of the GNU Octave Beginner’s Guide, one of the few books on GNU Octave besides the official GNU Octave manuals.

Both Matlab and Octave (i.e. its open source equivalent) are not very friendly as far as default function arguments are concerned. Therefore, a simple script for both MATLAB and Octave is provided, along with some examples of its usage, that makes working with default function arguments little easier.

If your desktop hardware includes a graphics processing unit (GPU), you can do some cool image processing with the CVL suite of tools, which includes in image viewer, an image tone mapper, and a command-line tool for non-interactive image processing.

Chakra Edn 2011.11 is the second maintenance release of the relatively new desktop Linux distribution with some ties to Arch Linux.

I recently discovered a fairly new project that has an interesting take on Linux music production: the Open Octave Project. The goal of Open Octave is to provide an environment for audio and MIDI production specifically for orchestral music and film scoring.

Jigdo, if you’re not familiar, takes a current Ubuntu image and compares its contained packages with the packages within an updated image (ie; alpha vs beta, beta vs RC, RC vs final). Using this method you’re only downloading the packages that have *changed* between images and not the entire image again.

GIMP or GNU Image Manipulation Program is a freely distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, a image format converter, etc.