Re: octave-forge newby install question

[Quentin Spencer]

the_verge wrote:
> Or, as an alternative, is there a way to have both octave 2.1 and octave 2.9
> installed, and have octave-forge work for both of them?  My linux
> distribution (MEPIS) has access to Ubuntu repositories, which have octave
> 2.1, octave 2.9.6, and octave-forge 2006.3.17-2 available.  However,
> octave-forge is only linked to octave2.1, (as a dependency) so when I launch
> octave2.9, I don't have the octave-forge functionality.
>
> If I just go ahead and install octave2.9, octave2.1, and octave-forge, is
> there something simple I can do (in my .octaverc file perhaps) so that when
> I sart octave2.9, I get the full octave-forge functionality?
>   

This isn't really practical because octave forge contains many compiled 
functions (.oct files) which are not compatible with both 2.1 and 2.9 
because of API changes. Many of the .m files could theoretically be 
shared between two releases, but I think it is best to just install two 
separate versions.

As far as your original question about LOADPATH, the problem is that 
LOADPATH was removed in recent 2.9.x releases in favor of the new 
functions addpath and rmpath. The documentation in octave-forge was not 
updated to reflect this. If you were able to install octave-forge as 
root into the system install path, I think octave should find the 
octave-forge functions without the LOADPATH lines in your .octaverc 
file. If that doesn't work, I suggest reading the help text on addpath 
and modifying the lines to use that function.

Quentin