1.4 On what platforms does Octave run?

Octave runs on various Unices—at least Linux and Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows and anything you can compile it on. Binary distributions exist at least for Debian, Suse, Fedora and RedHat Linuxes (Intel and AMD CPUs, at least), for Mac Os X and Windows' 98, 2000 and XP.

Two and three dimensional plotting is fully supported using gnuplot.

The underlying numerical solvers are currently standard Fortran ones like Lapack, Linpack, Odepack, the Blas, etc., packaged in a library of C++ classes. If possible, the Fortran subroutines are compiled with the system's Fortran compiler, and called directly from the C++ functions. If that's not possible, you can still compile Octave if you have the free Fortran to C translator f2c.

Octave is also free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.