GNU Octave, the free open-source programming language for scientific computing and numerical computation, rolled out the new 10.1.0 release.

The official announcement is not ready at the moment of writing. Though, the source tarball was made available to download since last week. And, I’ve made the package into PPA for all current Ubuntu releases.

According to the NEWS file in source code, GNU Octave 10 introduced 3 new functions. They are:

• clim – query or set color axis limits for plots.
• rticklabels – query or set the tick labels on the r-axis of a polar plot.
• thetaticklabels – query or set the tick labels on the theta-axis of a polar plot.

The release also introduced 3 new command line options. They are --no-init-user / --no-init-site to NOT read user / site-wide configuration files at startup, and --no-init-all to NOT read any configuration files at startup.

There are as well 3 short form aliases, -e for --eval, -g for --gui, and -G for --no-gui. And, the --verbose, -V command-line option has been deprecated.

The 10.1.0 release also include performance improvements. The nchoosek algorithm is now ~2x faster and provides greater precision. The nextpow2 algorithm is now more accurate for inputs very close to a power of 2, and the output class now matches the input class for Matlab compatibility.

Other changes include:

• jsonencode now outputs integers and floating point integers without “.0” suffix.
• hist now accepts N-dimensional array inputs for input Y.
• Support setting breakpoints in set or get methods of classdef properties.
• .mex files now link to the new library liboctmex.
• pkg describe command now supports a new Tracker tag in the DESCRIPTION file and returns package-provided repository and bug tracker URLs.
• pkg install now mentions package-provided URL and package-provided bug tracker if any.
• polar plots now include the center tick mark value, typically 0, in the 'rtick' parameter when the plot is created.
• plot3 now draws a single marker if only one data point is given.
• height and width are now aliases for the rows and columns functions.
• All colormaps now default to a size of 256 colors.
• The first argument to colormap may now be a figure or axes object.
• iqr now provides compatible output for empty inputs.
• rat now accepts complex inputs.
• issorted now accepts the MODE option "monotonic".
• movfun and movslice functions now accept wlen equal to 1 or [0,0].
• The nancond property for movfun has been fully implemented and made Matlab-compatible.
• movmin and movmax have default behavior set to omitnan.
• movmad function now defaults to calculating median absolute deviation.
• symbfact outputs count, parent, and post are now row vectors rather than column vectors.

GNU Octave 10 removed some functions that are deprecated since Octave 8. They include shift (replacement circshift), sparse_auto_mutate, fminsearch parameter, and load options of -force and -import.

There are as well some functions deprecated. For more details, either wait & see the official release note, or see the “NEWS” file in source.

Get GNU Octave 10.1.0

The source tarball is available to download at GNU.org via the link below:

To make life easy, I’ve made the package into this unofficial PPA for Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 24.10, and Ubuntu 25.04.

Just press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal, and run 3 commands below one by one to add PPA and install:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/octave

sudo apt update

sudo apt install octave

Uninstall:

To uninstall the .deb package, use command:

sudo apt remove octave octave-common

And, use the command below to uninstall the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/octave

For Linux Mint, also run sudo apt update to manually refresh package cache afterward.