Re: How to launch Octave with its GUI ?

[Michael Goffioul]

On 7/25/07, Julien R <address@hidden> wrote:
> I'm new to Octave and installed its binary on Win32 (XP) with cygwin, i.e.
> not a bundle executable.
>
> I read lot of papers and posts about how installing cygwin and Octave on
> Windows, but nothing about how to start it.

There's also Windows binary packages of octave, which are not based on
cygwin, that you might want to look at. See
http://www.dbateman.org/?page=octave&lang=EN or
http://octave.sourceforge.net

> Of course, I can start Octave from the cygwin console, but I could not find
> a way to start it with its graphical interface. Ideally, I would like to put
> some shortcut on my desktop, pointing a ".bat" file to launch Octave.

What do you mean with "graphical interface"? Octave does not have by default
a graphical interface, it simply runs in a console. Of course, if you
want to use
plots (which uses gnuplot), you'll need to have a X server running as
well. If this
is what you mean, then look into C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\startxwin.bat: this is
a batch script to start the X server and an X terminal. You can probably tune it
to start octave in the terminal.

> A more general problem is that I often cannot find the ".sh" configuration
> scripts. I also wonder if the call to a ".sh" Linux script can be done from
> within a Windows ".bat" file, for instance as parameter of some Linux
> command.

The only way to run a shell script within a .bat file is to run it
through a shell
interpreter like bash (like in "bash -i --login -c script.sh"). This
also means that
once bash exits, the shell environment (all variables) is lost. In
other words, if
you shell script setup some variables and export them, this won't have
any effect
in you .bat file. In this kind of situation, the best is then to write
a full .sh script
that do everything you want, then write a one-line .bat file that runs
the .sh script
through bash.

Michael.