Hello,
A collegue asked me this afternoun "to install a version of Octave in order
to read Excell (.xls) files". He was using a 3.2.4, the version with an icon
looking like small omega, under Windows 7 64 bits. I installed cygwin and
selected as only product octave, which came as version 3.6.4 Then I
installed the packages io and java from -forge. 'io' was OK, but the java
failed; I got a message about "JAVA_HOME" not set. I set it to
'/cygdrive/c/Program Files (x86)/Java', restarted, but it failed. Under the
'verbose switch', I got a message from sh complaining that the path name
contains illegal characters (the parens).