Re: Downloading Win32 Installer

[Philip Nienhuis]

"Dave Borger" <address@hidden> wrote:
> The instructions at http://www.octave.org/download.html indicate that
> there is a Windows binary available at matlinks.sourceforge.net.  This
> then takes me to
> http://tech-research.buffalostate.edu/%7Etom/index.html.  When I click
> on the instruction Download Octave 2.1.31 for Win32 I am sent to a page
> with the following message:

> Forbidden

> You don't have permission to access /~tom/octave-windows.exe on this
> server.
> Apache/1.3.12 Server at tech-reserach.buffalostate.edu Port 80

> What do I do now?

Apparently the link on http://www.octave.org/download.html is out of
date. Try:

   http://download.sourceforge.net/matlinks

and search for:
   octave-windows-2000oct25d.exe   (Should install OK on many Win32
versions; but on my Win-ME (Dutch language version) it didn't)
or download:
   octave-windows.exe  (AFAIK original version by T.C. Weichmann?, a
past link on his page seemed to point to this file; anyway it did
install OK on my Win-ME, save for the desktop icon).

At the moment there does not seem to be support for any of these
binaries.
Watch out for Windows language problems (the Octave-win32 binaries are
probably set up for English Windows versions). I would not know how to
deal with these; a while ago other people on the list reported similar
problems.

Some hints:
Once you got it installed, right-click on the desktop item for Octave
and select "Properties". Then, on the tab "Memory", in the section
"Conventional Memory", select "Protected" (just to be sure). Next, on
the tab "Misc", set the ruler under "Idle sensitivity" to "Low"
(leftmost position; Octave will run a bit faster then).
And then press "OK" (don't forget ;-).
Finally, search in the 2000 help-octave mailinglist archive for how to
get Ins/Del etc to work (message #1281 ?) and -if you want- on how to
change the font.

If you dare to venture, you might try to build Octave for Win32 yourself
using the Cygwin stuff from http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/, GNUplot
(ftp://ftp.dartmouth.edu/pub/gnuplot/) and any Octave version source
tarball you choose; you might need to search the Web for
pipe-gnuplot.exe (or its sourcecode).

Having installed octave-windows.exe (and thus starting out from a bare
Cygwin), I recently expanded my Cygwin to an almost full Linux emulation
incl. gcc (altogether 100 Mb excl. Octave, for compiling you might need
150-200 Mb extra), and I built Octave 2.0.16 (latest stable version) for
win32 this way. 
In the end it all turned out to be *very* easy (but a long wait as
compiling Octave on my 166 Mhz Pentium running Win-ME took > 4 hours,
not to mention downloading Cygwin and the Octave sources).
To compare: on the same computer, under genuine Linux (Mandrake 7.0),
compiling took only 2 hours. Octave also runs very much faster under
Linux & OS/2 than under Win32.

Good luck,

Philip Nienhuis



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