EEGLAB System Requirements

Matlab version: The latest version of EEGLAB runs on Matlab 7.6 (2008b) or later under any operating system (Linux/Unix, Windows, Mac OSX). For earlier Matlab version, download legacy version EEGLAB v4.3 which will run on Matlab 5.3. For Mac OSX, older versions of Matlab might not be compatible with the operating system, so you might have to install the latest Matlab version. EEGLAB extensions (in particular BCILAB and SIFT) also require Matlab 7.6 or later. Note that all EEGLAB signal processing functions also runs on the free Matlab clone Octave although graphics cannot be displayed (this is nethertheless useful for high performance computing application - see the EEGLAB wiki for more details).

Memory requirements: Using multi-core 64-bit processors with large amounts of RAM may be essential for analyzing large datasets -- 8 Gb or more RAM is recommended (also see the EEGLAB wiki tutorial for tips on minimizing memory usage). Linux is to be preferred as an environment for processing EEG data using EEGLAB, mostly because of better memory management of Matlab under Linux (if using Linux, choose Fedora over Ubuntu as there are sometimes minor graphics problem with how Matlab handles OpenGL under Ubuntu).

Additional Matlab toolboxes: EEGLAB requires no additional toolboxes. However, some toolboxes are recommended. By order of importance,

• Signal Processing toolbox: although EEGLAB incorporates functions to replace functions it uses from this toolbox when necessary (e.g., for filtering and power spectra computation), they are not as efficient as the toolbox Matlab functions. This toolbox is also required by some EEGLAB extensions such as SIFT. This is probably the most important toolbox to have.
• Statistics toolbox: this toolbox is required by some EEGLAB extensions (such as Fieldtrip and SIFT). This toolbox also contains a large number of functions useful for the advanced programmer to compute statistics and cross-validation.
• Optimization toolbox: another recommended toolbox used by some EEGLAB extensions. This toolbox contains the powerful fminsearch function and derivative. Although Matlab now has this function by default in its core distribution, the optimization toolbox allows to perform finer tuning of its parameters.
• Image processing toolbox: this toolbox is required by some EEGLAB extensions (such as Fieldtrip).

Figure post processing: After figures are exported in the postscript vector format from Matlab/EEGLAB, a postscript editor is usually necessary to fine tune them for publication.