1. The GNU Octave language for numerical computations Octave is a (mostly Matlab (R) compatible) high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command-line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically. Octave uses some of the best and most respected numerical libraries as balgen, dassl, eisspack, fftpack, lapack, linpack, minpack, odepack, ranlib, slatec-fn and villad. Octave can be dynamically extended with user-supplied C++ files. From Debian 3.0r0 APT

2. The GNU Octave language for numerical computations Octave is a (mostly Matlab (R) compatible) high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command-line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically. This package is an emoty 'transition' package. It is needed in order to transfer smoothly from the octave packages (up to and including version octave*2.0.16-1) to the new octave2.0* packages. The new octave2.0* can coexist with the upcoming octave2.1* packages of the new development version of GNU Octave. Once you have all the octave2.0 package you want installed, you can delete this package. From Debian 3.0r0 APT