From bug-octave-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Thu Jun 7 20:45:17 2001 Subject: RE: Installation of Octave From: "Julian A. de Marchi, Ph.D" To: "Ihor Rokach" , "'bug-octave UWISC'" Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 21:44:50 -0400 Hi Ihor =) I feel very bad for the problems that everyone has had with the Windows installation of Octave. These problems have existed since the beginning, when Tom Weichmann was kind enough to provide a solution that at least worked for the other 50% who are able to install successfully. The work I did myself was really not much, I merely finessed it a bit, perhaps made it seem more professional than it is robust. I wish that we (or anyone) had a solution to this problem. It bears out my initial thoughts shared privately with John Eaton: that there are many non-Linux users out there who also wish to use Octave, and contribute to its user-based community. It was never anyone's intention, certainly not mine, nor Tom's, nor the Octave community's, to mislead people into a potential installation trap. It's only a minor guilt relief to see that there are also several troubles with Linux compilation on certain systems! Short of recommending a switch to Linux, I can only encourage you to join our collective efforts to build a proper Windows installation. And, apologise sincerely for any possible misrepresentation of Octave for Windows speci- fically, as a fully debugged solution. Tom and I both thoroughly tested the installations on the machines available to us (Win95, Win98, and WinNT 4.0) and requested input from others on WinME & Win2k installation, _before_ releasing the package. We have been equally consternated at the problems some people have had. I'm not sure what else I can say, aside from expressing our desire to also find a fix, as soon as we find the collective resources. Your help, and any- one's, in this regard, would be most appreciated. - Julian -----Original Message----- From: Ihor Rokach [mailto:rokach at tu dot kielce dot pl] Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2001 9:33 AM To: julian at matlinks dot net Subject: FYI: Installation of Octave Dear Dr. de Marchi , I have read your discussion with Professor Kocbach in the help-octave mailing list about the problems with installation of CygWin version of Octave. I have spent (or wasted, I am afraid) a lot of time trying to install this program. The last my attempt was exactly according to your suggestions (even more resrictive): - purely clean PC with Windows 98 only installed, - 'clear' autoexec.bat without any long PATH, etc. - a plenty (4K) of environment space defined in the config.sys - EXE-installer created using dev-version of the program and the result (both in safe and 'normal' modes) is the same - octave itself is not installed. Perhaps you are right - there is something bad with unpacking of the *.tar.gz archive. Thus, the "lack of environment space" is definitly not an ONLY problem of this installation file. At the moment I can only unpack octave.tar.gz manually , move sh.exe with cygwin1.dll into usr/bin directory (otherwise octave does not see them) and run octave directly. Of course GNUplot cannot be used, etc. I cannot run rxvt.exe too. Anyway you were right - that is a "nice world of open source software" :-((( Sincerely yours, == Ihor V.Rokach, PhD Assistant Professor Kielce University of Technology Al. 1000-lecia PP 7, 25-314 Kielce, POLAND phone: +(48-41)34-24-305 fax: 34-24-295 ------------------------------------------------------------- Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL. Octave's home on the web: http://www.octave.org How to fund new projects: http://www.octave.org/funding.html Subscription information: http://www.octave.org/archive.html -------------------------------------------------------------