Re: TR: [sciclub] Scilab news

[Christoph Dalitz]

On Fri, 28 Nov 2003 19:44:05 -0300
Agustin Barto <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> The headaches are not Octave's fault. Cygwin doesn't work well on
> Windows9X/ME. I had problems with a lot of other programs that are based
> on it. There's a long standing issue with fork() that looks like will
> never be fixed.
> 
Actually this is not Cygwin's fault, but due to the fact that the full Win32
API has not been implemented by Microsoft in Windows 9x/ME: all functions
seem to be there, but some simply do not work (like CreatePipe()). Note that
this is not a hidden bug, but documented in the Win32 API documentation.

> Given that all our computers are on Windows98 and ME we had no choice
> but to drop Octave for Windows. Next year we'll try to get the teachers
> and the students to use Linux, but it's going to be pretty hard.
>
I have just made the switch from Scilab on Windows to Octave on Linux (for 
various
reasons) with my students and have experienced little problems.

The students are only end users and thus do not need any deep Unix knowledge:
five or six commands will suffice, and when you use konqueror as a file manager,
this can even boil down to two commands ("cd" and "octave").
The same should apply to your fellow teachers.

Christoph Dalitz



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