Octave on limited resources PDA's

[Brian Dushaw]

Dear Octavers,
Out of curiosity, I am making this inquiry concerning octave on
limited resources PDA's.  Limited resources means limited memory 
(32-64 MB) and cpu speed (ca. 50-200 MHz).  In particular, I fuss 
with Debian linux on PDA's with ARM cpus.  I've just poked around
the mail lists and wiki; apologies if I missed the answers to 
these questions.

I presently use octave 2.0.17 on such PDA's - it works o.k., if
a little slow at times.  The newer versions of octave also work
but MUCH slower; so slow as to be rather unusable.  I suspect
it is the various "newer" libraries, e.g. atlas, that slows things
down.  Loading recent versions of octave is very slow, and consumes 
too much memory to be useful on (older) PDAs.  I installed a
recent version using the Debian packages.

So, I went back to the (obsolete) 2.0.17 version of octave.

I wonder if someone can comment on the situation - Could recent
versions of octave be configured/compiled a little differently 
to be more sparing in their use of resources?  Perhaps a branch
of octave could be established that might be more suitable for
limited resources (e.g., the minimo browser is a branch of firefox
for PDA's)?  Or perhaps the 2.0.17 version of octave is somewhat
mislabeled as "obsolete", and might be labeled as "minimal resources
version"?  One could, for example, limit matrix dimensions to be
something like 100X100, say, for use on a PDA (no one is going to 
use such a machine for serious, large calculations), which might
save memory (would it at all?).  

This inquiry is of course low-priority, perhaps aimed at preserving
the "obsolete" branch of octave, or of seeing if there was interest
in a "minimal resources" branch of octave (which might be just a 
particular configuration for compiling).

Cheers and a prosperous '07!

B.D.