RE: NT, Octave and Cygwin

[Philip Nienhuis]

> Does anyone know how to get the windows port of octave
> (2.1.31) and the cygwin package to peacefully coexist
> under Windows NT4.0?
:
> It appears that the windows port of octave and the
> cygwin package mount "/" to different directories. 
:
> unexpected behavior.  Does anyone know how to set up
> the mounts so that I can run octave and cygwin simultaneously?


AFAIK, the best trick is to:
1. First install Octave for Windows
2. Only then install the rest of the Cygwin stuff.

In step 2., Cygwin will note that a previous Cygwin installation is
present and will ask if you want to install the rest of the Cygwin stuff
at the previous (i.c. Octave) mount points.

A while later a question is asked about CR (linux) to CR or CR/LF (DOS)
translation (at least, it was asked in my case). I chose CR/LF and
encountered no problems yet (I edit script files using regular
DOS/Windows text editors).

If you first installed Cygwin, probably the best you can do is
downloading the most recent Octave sources and build & compile them
yourself. Admittedly that is a bit harder then just installing
Octave-Win, but there is a chance that the latter won't install
properly.
In addition, by compiling it yourself you also get TexInfo working
properly, and as the Cygwin stuff in the binary Octave-Win distro is
getting a bit outdated, using a newer version has some advantages.
It is not hard to check your current Octave-Win stuff to see how various
things are implemented (e.g., pipe-gnuplot, termcap, octaverc, GNUplot,
etc.)

You might try your luck by, from a (bare) Cygwin prompt (i.e. using the
Cygwin mount points in your Win registry), moving or copying all the
Cygwin files to the corresponding Octave/Cygwin mount points, and then
change the Win-registry mount points to the Octave/Cygwin ones. Perhaps
(hopefully) it works, perhaps not. AFAIK the only connections between
the Cygwin and the Windows file systems are those registry entries, so
in principle it should work.

BTW, on an old hard disk I had both the "old" Cygwin stuff (from the now
"deceased" 2.0.14 binary distro) AND the Octave-for-Windows binary
distro working peacefully together (but I never tried them
simultaneously) under Win95. I guess the problem is that newer Cygwin
versions do not allow this anymore.

A while ago I started writing a sort of Octave-for-Windows FAQ - some
months ago I sent a draft version to Julian de Marchi, one of the
Octave-for-Windows developers - but due to regular trips abroad and some
stressy projects I had no time to get into a publishable form yet.
Currently this FAQ only features how to build Octave from its sources
using an almost complete Cygwin install, plus some other technical info
which might be useful when running Cygwin & Octave. Only starting late
September I might have some spare time to finish it.
If someone else on this list would like to help with it, I can e-mail
her/him the most recent version.

Philip Nienhuis



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