Joel's Tricky Octave Installation on His Mac..

There are numerous ways to install Octave on a Mac.  The Octave
homepage listed on my Math 307 page will tell you how.

I just want to point out that the installation can be a bit tricky
on a Mac, and I want to tell you what I needed to do, in case you
have issues that are similar to mine.

I will try to recall what happened, but it's a bit of a blur.  The
upshot is that I had some minor problems, some kinda weird ones that
I don't understand, but everything works great now.

I am a big fan of MacPorts.  That is what I used.  I used MacPorts
about a year ago to install a bunch of stuff.  I thought that to
install Octave, I would simply need to "su" to an admin account and
type:

  sudo port install octave

This failed.  So I went through all the MacPort steps: (1) downloaded
the latest Xcode, and (2) from Xcode I installed Command Line Developer
Tools.  At some point I also ran Xcode and accepted a license.  Again,
I typed 

  sudo port install octave-devel +atlas+docs

(which is recommended at http://wiki.octave.org/Octave_for_MacOS_X ),
and it failed to install some program (I think it was "gnuplot" or
something like that) on which Octave depends.  So then I typed

  sudo port install xxxx

where xxxx was the program on which Octave depends that failed to install.
This worked!!!  Then I typed something like

  sudo port install octave-devel +atlas+docs

which worked as well!!!  And I was happy...

...I was happy until I ran LaTeX, and found that MacPorts had build a 
different version of LaTeX into my system and made that the default
LaTeX version.  I fixed this temporarily by putting "/usr/texbin:" 
first in my path, but then decided to use the MacPorts LaTeX version
but give the "full installation" via

  sudo port install texlive +full

Once again everything worked and I was happy.  At least for now...