Instructions for installing Octave in Windows

Cygwin, which is a program that you need to have installed on your computer in order to run octave on a Windows machine, can now be downloaded (at much greater speed from campus locations) from http://mirror.calvin.edu/cygwin. The instructions here (provided by Tim Brom) are mostly taken from John W. Eaton's website on this topic, with modifications to suit our situation at Calvin.

The following is my current best set of directions for installing Octave on a Windows system using either a binary package or by installing from sources using the Cygwin tools. If you already have Cygwin installed, you may need to update your installation of tools to include those mentioned below.

NOTE: In a few places he talks about doing a Source installation or a source compile and install. If you do not know what that means, you want a binary install. If you are doing a binary install be sure to skip steps 12-16 (inclusive).

Following these steps should give you an Octave installation that includes all the necessary tools for building dynamically linked functions (.oct files).

  1. Use your favorite browser to view the page http://mirror.calvin.edu/cygwin
  2. Click on setup.exe.
  3. A dialog should appear with the option to run the setup program from its current location or save it to disk. Either will work, but I usually choose to save the setup program to disk so that it is possible to run it later to update the installation without having to go back to the web page using a browser.
  4. Run the setup program.
  5. Choose “Install from Internet.”
  6. Select a root install directory. You may choose any directory, but it needs to have about 600MB available to install all the necessary Cygwin tools plus build and install Octave from sources. That may seem like a large disk space requirement, but remember that you are getting more than just Octave, you are installing a Unix-like development environment including C, C++, and Fortran compilers as well. Once Octave is installed, you can delete the sources and build directory, freeing up about 250MB.

    You may choose to install for just you or all users (if you have permission to do so). I would select “Unix” as the default text file type (this option should be the default).

  7. Select a local package directory. This is a directory that the setup program will use to temporarily store package files before installing them. It should have plenty of space (probably 70MB or more). You may delete this directory once the installation is complete.
  8. Select your Internet Connection. Probably “Direct Connection” is OK unless you are behind a firewall of some kind that limits your access to the Internet. On-campus students using resnet should select “Direct Connection.”
  9. Choose mirror.calvin.edu from the list of download sites. If mirror.calvin.edu does not appear in the list of download sites, enter http://mirror.calvin.edu/cygwin in the dialog (there is a textbox at the bottom with an Add button to the right—enter the URL in the textbox and click the Add button).

    If you want to install a binary package of Octave, also add the User URL

    ftp://ftp.octave.org/pub/octave/cygwin
    Make sure both http://mirror.calvin.edu and ftp://ftp.octave.org are selected before continuing.
  10. Select packages.

    Binary and Source installations:

    Select the gnuplot package from the Graphics category. The gnuplot package from ftp.octave.org will give you the Windows binary repackaged for Cygwin. If you select the gnuplot package from one of the Cygwin mirrors, you will get a recent 3.8 beta version (pre 4.0 release).
    Additional packages for binary install:
    Also select the Octave packages you want from the Math category.
    Additional packages for source compile and install:

    The defaults are not enough to build all of Octave from sources. In addition to the default set of packages, you should select the following packages from the following categories:

    Archive: unzip
    Devel: autoconf, binutils, bison, cvs, dejagnu, flex, gcc, g++, g77, gperf, make
    Text: less, tetex, tetex-base
    Utils: diff, patch
    Once you have made these selections, click the Next button to download and install all the selected packages. The download and install may take a while depending on the speed of your computer and your connection to the net.
  11. Once the download and file installation is done, click Finish. I usually choose to create an icon on the desktop and put an icon in the start menu. After you click finish, a series of scripts will run, displaying some output in a terminal window. It will take a few minutes.

    Skip to step 17 if you are installing the binary package.

  12. Get the Octave sources, either from a current snapshot distribution or from CVS.

    You should check the web page http://www.octave.org/download.html or look for the file RECOMMENDED-IS-N.NN.NN in the ftp download directory to see what version is currently recommended (N.NN.NN will be an actual version number, like 2.1.50). If more recent versions may be available they should be considered experimental.

    The CVS sources are only recommended for people who want be involved in Octave's development process and who don't mind running into the occasional show-stopping bug.

    Snapshot:

    1. Download a copy of the current version of Octave from ftp://ftp.octave.org. You may use the command line ftp client in Cygwin or a web browser. You are looking for the most recent recommended version in the pub/octave/bleeding-edge directory. At the time of this writing, it was octave-2.1.50.tar.gz. Save this file to your Cygwin home directory. This directory will usually be called something like c:\cygwin\home\jwe from Windows (the precise location depends on where you chose to install Cygwin).

      IMPORTANT: If you use the ftp client, be sure to set the binary mode for downloads by typing

      binary
      at the ftp prompt.
    2. Unpack the source files using the command:
      tar zxf octave-2.1.50.tar.gz
      in the Cygwin shell. This command will create a subdirectory called octave-2.1.50 in your home directory.
    3. Change your current working directory to the top-level Octave source directory:
      cd octave-2.1.50
      then continue with step 14 below.
    CVS:
    1. Check out a copy of the current sources from the public CVS archive by running the following commands
      cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@www.octave.org:/cvs login
      cvs -z 9 -d :pserver:anoncvs@www.octave.org:/cvs checkout octave
      in the Cygwin shell. The first command will prompt you for a password; reply with anoncvs. The checkout command will create a subdirectory called octave containing the current CVS version of the Octave sources.
    2. Change your current working directory to the top-level Octave source directory:
      cd octave
    3. Build the configure scripts by running the command
      ./autogen.sh
  13. Configure Octave by running the command
    ./configure --enable-shared --disable-static
    This command will take several minutes to run as the configure script determines what features are available on your system. You need the --enable-shared option if you want to build dynamically loaded functions (.oct files) later. You may omit the --disable-static option if you want to build static libraries (.a files) in addition to shared libraries, but the build will take about twice as long to complete.
  14. Build the Octave binary by running the command
    make
    You may see warnings from gcc saying that __cdecl is redefined or that all code is position independent. You may safely ignore these warnings.
  15. (OPTIONAL) Run Octave's regression test suite by running the command
    make check
    Running the tests may take a very long time, so if you are in a hurry, you might want to skip this step. At the time of this writing, there are 4 “expected” failures related to the try-catch and eval commands. You may safely ignore those failures.
  16. Complete the installation by running the command
    make install
  17. Try starting Octave by running the command
    octave
    in the cygwin shell and then typing
    sombrero (41)
    at the Octave prompt to see if you can create a plot.
  18. Try to build a .oct file and run it:
    cd examples
    mkoctfile hello.cc
    octave
    ...
    octave:1> hello
    Hello, world!
    If you are doing a binary package install, the examples should be installed in the /usr/share/doc/octave/... XXX FIXME XXX
John W. Eaton
jwe@bevo.che.wisc.edu
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Department of Chemical Engineering
Wed Jan 14 13:37:15 2004

Modified 3/25/05
Tim H. Brom
thb3@calvin.edu
Calvin College


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