Re: Installing a bleeding-edge Octave next to a stable Octave

[Geordie McBain]

On Tue, 2007-03-27 at 16:41 -0700, Steve C. Thompson wrote:
> Dear Group,
> 
> Now that I've learned about some things about Octave's MEX
> capability from
> http://www.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/help-octave/2007-March/003473.html
> , I need to think about installing the latest Octave.  As the
> previous post states, 2.9.10.  I'm running 2.1.73 in Ubuntu,
> which is given to me simply with `apt-get install octave' .

You can get Octave 2.9.6 in Ubuntu (edgy) in the package octave2.9.
It's in the edgy universe repository.  I presume 2.9.10 will turn up
there eventually?  The Ubuntu package "octave" is just an alias for the
package "octave2.1".

>   I'm
> wondering:
> 
>   1. how best to install 2.9.10 and if I can keep 2.1.73 intact;
> 2. if 1. happens, can I run the two different versions at will,
>      in parallel (for example, I'm currently running simulations
>      in 2.1.73, and I'd like to, at the same time, play around
>      with 2.9.10 for the MEX work); and
>   
You can have both octave2.1 and octave2.9 packages installed.  The real
binaries are /usr/bin/octave-2.1.73 and /usr/bin/octave-2.9.6.  The
packages provide symbolic links octave2.1 and octave2.9 for these, and
another link /usr/bin/octave to /etc/alternatives/octave which is itself
a symbolic link to /usr/bin/octave-2.1.73 if you have octave2.1
installed or otherwise to /usr/bin/octave-2.9.6 if you have octave2.9
but not octave2.1 installed.

> 3. what the chances are I'm about to completely mess up my
>      system!

Not too high.  Acceptable, I think.  Personally though since updating to
octave2.9 I haven't looked back.  Lots of great new features and I don't
recall encountering any backward incompatibilities.