I have found a bug in octave on PCLinuxOS, it is probably badly compiled or so, not sure...
Someone have same problem:
http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/Command-plot-not-working-Get-invalid-handle-error-from-get-td1671758.htmlcommands
x=(1:11)-6;
y=x.^2 + 2;
plot(x,y)
produce this error:
error: get: invalid handle (= 1.79769e+308)
error: called from:
error: /usr/share/octave/3.2.2/m/plot/__plt_get_axis_arg__.m at line 57, colu
mn 9
error: /usr/share/octave/3.2.2/m/plot/plot.m at line 178, column 18
the page says
This is your problem. Most likely the LAPACK and/or BLAS libraries
you are using have been miscompiled. You should look for updated
LAPACK/BLAS libraries. If they are not available, or if they don't
fix the problem, then complain to whoever packages LAPACK and BLAS for
your system.
Octave uses a function from LAPACK to determine the floating point
format for your system, and to get values for the machine precision.
If those things are wrong, Octave will not function correctly. In
later versions of Octave, this warning has been turned into a fatal
error.