Dtyjlui

On 14.04 system I have:

freemat/trusty,now 4.0-5build1 i386 [installed]

  mathematics framework (mostly matlab compatible)



freemat-data/trusty,now 4.0-5build1 all [installed,automatic]

  freemat data files



freemat-help/trusty,now 4.0-5build1 all [installed,automatic]

  freemat help files

But I cannot find a newer version of the software.

Freemat 4.0-5build1 is the newest version for 14.04.

If you need a newer version, you should probably install from source, or upgrade to 18.04, which has Freemat 4.2 available.

You can show more information about a package with apt policy packagename. This is what is shown on 18.04:

$ apt policy freemat

freemat:

  Installed: (none)

  Candidate: 4.2+dfsg1-6

  Version table:

     4.2+dfsg1-6 500

        500 http://no.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/universe amd64 Packages

For me it seems that FreeMat project has stopped its developing. The files section on SourceForge site contain files not newer than 2013-08-15.

The search on packages.ubuntu.com confirms this hypotheses - modern Ubuntu 18.04 version have version 4.2.

So I think that we can compile the application 4.2 from source on your current Ubuntu 14.04 LTS system.

Follow these steps:

1. 
   

   Remove your current FreeMat

   
   
   

   sudo apt-get purge freemat freemat-data freemat-help
   
   

   
   


2. 
   

   Install all needed development tools

   
   
   

   sudo apt-get install build-essential git devscripts python-all-dev llvm-dev doxygen libffi-dev libboost-math-dev libclang-dev libedit-dev xvfb
   
   

   
   


3. 
   

   Install build dependencies for FreeMat

   
   
   

   sudo apt-get build-dep freemat
   
   

   
   


4. 
   

   Get source of FreeMat (source code is hosted on Debian servers, it is normal)

   
   
   

   git clone -b debian/4.2+dfsg1-6 https://salsa.debian.org/science-team/freemat.git
   
   

   
   


5. 
   

   Compile FreeMat to Debian packages

   
   
   

   cd freemat
   
   rm debian/source/format # to support compilation on 14.04
   
   rm -rf tests/ # remove tests
   
   mkdir tests/ # create empty tests directory 
   
   dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us -d
   
   

   
   


6. 
   

   Install compiled deb-packages to the system

   
   
   

   sudo apt-get install libjs-jquery
   
   sudo dpkg -i ../freemat*.deb
   
   

   
   


7. 
   

   Enjoy

   
   
   

   

   
   

Freemat 4.2 is in 18.04 (Bionic).

No community members have volunteered to backport 4.2 to 14.04 (Trusty).