Matlab 7 startup problem

Recently I had to install Matlab 7 on a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop running Windows XP SP3. Everything went OK during installation. However, Matlab failed to start: it started, showed the splash screen, show the full application window, and as soon as the prompt was about to appear, all windows closes.
After some googleing I found out that this is caused by Matlab 7 using the wrong version of the Blas library (http://www.mathkb.com/Uwe/Forum.aspx/matlab/12542/MATLAB-7-R14-crashing). Dell Inspiron 1501 has an AMD Athlon processor.
The solution was quite easy (considering how much time I lost to find it): add the environmental variable BLAS_VERSION with the value atlas_Athlon.dll.

Octave taking over Matlab

I'm trying to replace my Matlab R12/Windows habit with Octave 3/Linux. I installed the QtOctave IDE, but it seems to bulky (especially because I use Gnome). I didn't liked it, so I uninstalled it.

Next I tried another approach: I installed the gedit-plugins package which contains the embeded terminal plugin and enabled the filesystem and embeded terminal plugins. My GEdit window setup looks like similar to Matlab's default view, except for the workspace and history sidepanes (which I didn't use much anyway).

I also added the file .octaverc in my home directory and added this line to it:
edit EDITOR 'gedit %s'
This command makes Octave's edit command to open files in the gedit (instead of default emacs).