Octave on cygwin

[John W. Eaton]

On 18-Feb-2005, A Hodel <address@hidden> wrote:

| One of my students is attempting to install and run octave on the 
| cygwin environment, which I do not have.  If anyone can make a 
| recommendation on how to proceed, I'd be grateful for the help.

I don't normally use Cygwin, but I have built Octave 2.1.64 on a
Windows system with Cygwin recently.  I haven't tried it, but I expect
that 2.1.65 will also work without problems.

My current recommendation is to install the latest Cygwin, including
the gnuplot that comes with it, then use X11 for plotting (the X
server no longer takes over the desktop).  This allows gnuplot to open
multiple plot windows.

If you install the required development tools, then you can build
Octave with the usual

  configure
  make
  make install

This process will take some time, but it works straight out of the
tarball for me and I'm not doing anything special, so it should also
work for you.

The copy of Octave that you compile this way will not include FFTW,
ATLAS, or support for HDF5 files, but it should run.  Due to some
problems with the current GCC, it will be a bit slower than it should
be for things like loops.  The GCC folks know about the problem.  I
hope they will have a fix for it before too long.

To use X11, start Cygwin, then type

  startx

This will open an xterm window.  Run Octave there, and you should have
plotting, including then run Octave in the xterm that opens.

There is someone working on what I hope will become an official
Cygwin package for Octave, so I hope this process will become simpler
in the near future.  If you are interested in helping out, send me
mail.

jwe



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