Error while installing Octave

6
votes

I am trying to install Octave on OS X. When executing brew install octave I get the following error:

octave: A LaTeX distribution is required to install.

You can install MacTeX distribution from:
  http://www.tug.org/mactex/

Make sure that "/usr/texbin", or the location you installed it to, is in
your PATH before proceeding.

I downloaded and installed MacTeX but it is still not working :(

How can I fix this?

2
octavehomebrew
I can only guess that you didn't install MacTeX properly. Open a terminal and if the command texlive does not work, then it's not installed. - carandraug
texlive doesnt work however I just tried to install MacTeX once again and everythin went fine. Where should it be installed? - Spearfisher
MacTeX will install texlive. If you don't have texlive installed then you don't have MacTeX installed, or at least not properly installed. - carandraug
I'm having this issue as well. 2.3GB for MacTeX? Are they out of their minds?? I'd rather get rid of octave at that point... - DaniG2k

2 Answers

12
votes

If you want to avoid the MacTeX dependency you can install Octave with brew as follows:

brew install octave --without-docs
6
votes

"Make sure that "/usr/texbin", or the location you installed it to, is in your PATH before proceeding."

This message may be the hint of the answer for you.

You need to set the PATH so that the Tex could be called from anywhere in your system. Adding the following line in the .bash_profile may fix it.

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/texbin/

The reason why the texlive command does not work have also same cause on this.