Octave - How to install packages on Windows - octave

Question
Due to the issue in Fix for Octave urlread causing Peer certificate cannot be authenticated with given CA certificates, I cannot install Octave packages on Windows.
Please suggest other ways to install. Particularly I would like to go through Gradients, Gradient Plots and Tangent Planes which requires Symbolic package.

EDIT: this bug is no longer present in Octave v4.2.1, and the issue described in the Question should no longer occur.
Yes, there appears to be a known issue logged on the bug tracker with the current release version of Octave (4.2.0) on windows being unable to connect to https due to the curl issue you identified in the linked discussions/questions. That bug report and the original help list discussion summarize the certificate issue and problem verification. It should be fixed in the next Octave release.
This, however, does not prevent you from installing packages. It only prevents you from using the program to go fetch packages to be installed. You are still able to go to the Octave Forge package site, manually download a package file, and then as described in the Octave manual and help for pkg run the install command.
E.g., you could download symbolic-2.4.0.tar.gz and save it to your current working directory. Then within octave, issue the following from the command line:
pkg install symbolic-2.4.0.tar.gz
NOTE: symbolic currently requires Python and Sympy installed. If you don't already have this on your Windows machine, the package maintainer has a separate self-contained package for Windows that can be obtained from the author's github repository. In this case you would download the package and run the command:
pkg install symbolic-win-py-bundle-2.4.0.zip
Another more tedious option would be for you to compile your own copy from development sources, as the fix has supposedly been pushed to the mxe-octave repository.

Related

The GMP configuration by MSYS2 remains incomplete

I'm using Windows 7 and the latest version of MSYS2.
For my work I needed to install GMP with MSYS2.
After installing and decompressing, I had to configure the GMP folder with the ./configure command.
But the problem is that the process starts and always stops at this point.
This line is actually one of the configuration preparations where the program stops.
What is the problem and how can it be fixed?
I think I provided enough information. If more information is needed, I can provide it.
Thanks

How can i upgrade my Octave version to the latest one?

I have the 4.0.3 Octave version on my machine.
and I would like to upgrade my version using windows.
Can someone tell me please the steps to follow?
Thanks.
If you want to remove v4.0.3, the complete answer will depend on how you installed that version in the first place.
If you used an executable installer, then there should be an 'uninstall' option available. On Windows 10, you can sometimes right click on the shortcut in the startmenu and an Uninstall option will appear. Otherwise you can follow the directions at this link to navigate through the Settings to the Apps & Features window, which lists everything installed and will provide an Uninstall option.
If you used a zip package to 'install' Octave 4.0.3 just by unzipping it to a folder on your hard drive, then no uninstall process is necessary. you can just delete the folder and shortcuts manually.
You can have multiple octave versions installed next to each other, the folders will have version numbers to prevent them from overwriting themselves.
To install the latest version (5.1.0 as of this answer, although 5.2.0 will be released very soon):
You can find the installation files for Windows by going to the Octave download page and clicking 'Windows'. There will be several file options there. Most people choose the first one (octave-5.1.0-w64-installer.exe) for 64bit systems. You can just download that or one of the other .exe versions, execute that program, and follow the prompts. If for some reason you would rather download a zip package and do a manual setup, I suggest you follow the instructions at the Octave for Microsoft Windows Wiki page to make sure everything is configured correctly.

Octave gets stuck on Busy... inside TeXmacs in Windows OS

I have TeXmacs and Octave installed, both working properly otherwise. I have also added the path to octave executable (i.e. C:\Octave\Octave-5.1.0.0\mingw64\bin) to the Windows environment variables and octave runs in cmd/PowerShell terminals and Jupyter with no hassle. However, when running Octave inside TeXmacs through Toolbar > insert > session > octave it gets stuck on Busy..., the same reaction for any other commands as well:
Octave gets stuk on Busy... inside TeXmacs.
This is my environment:
TeXmacs 1.99.9
Octave 5.1.0 (installed through Chocolatey)
Windows 10 version 1809
I would appreciate if you could help me know what is the problem and how I can solve it.
P.S. I have reported this issue in the TeXmacs repo.
#Foad. I wrote an updated Octave plugin for Texmacs. I tried it on Windows, OSX and Linux, works on the systems I have access to. If you are interested to test it, you can download the zipped archive from here https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/texmacs-dev/2019-12/msg00005.html.
To install it, unzip the archive and copy the octaveX directory in the application plugins folder, alongside all the plugins that come with the standard Texmacs installation. Won’t work if installed in ~/.Texmacs/plugins. If everything goes fine, you should find a new Insert/Session/OctaveX menu (note: I changed the session name). If not, try to refresh the plugin system with the menu Tools/Update/Plugins. If you try it, please let me know, especially if you find troubles. In case I will do my best to fix them.
A fundamental prerequisite is a working octave-cli command in a operating system shell. Should be standard on Linux, may require some additional setup on Windows (environmental variables) or OSX (.bash_profile). You can find some help and more details under the menu Help/Plug-ins/OctaveX.
Concerning the error you found, as far I understand there are some issues with the standard distributed plugin: first, a .octaverc file is missing, so several variables are not initialized, in addition the Windows version calls a not existent file. Moreover the plotting functions are quite old and are not compatibile with Octave newer than version 2 (or maybe 3, anyway a quite old version).
You could try to run the command in
%TEXMACS_PATH%/plugins/octave/bin/tm_octave.bat
from the terminal to see what happens. There is a problem with this plugin and it does not work also on Mac but I do not know enough Octave to fix it. Somehow it does not manage to find the files which are in
%TEXMACS_PATH%/plugins/octave/octave
Please try to modify tm-start.m to look like
d=getenv("TEXMACS_PATH");
if (length(d) > 0)
addpath("tm:polynomial:plot")
tmrepl
endif
In windows, octave should be run using the scripts octave.bat (in the mingw64\bin directory of the octave install) or octave.vbs (in the install directory) for the GUI
You should not run octave.exe directly.

How to install FEATool on Octave (Ubuntu 18.04)?

I want to install FEATool on Octave 4.2.2. Therefore, I went through these steps:
Downloading it.
Trying pkg install FEATool-Multiphysic.tar.gz in Octave command-line interface.
Octave returns this error:
COPYING file missing.
Neither GitHub nor FEATool provides any installation file for Octave or instructions about doing it.
Therefore, the question is:
How to install FEATool on Octave (Ubuntu 18.04)?
Following a quick preliminary check, it seems that the FEATool is no longer available or compatible with Octave since FEATool v1.10.
While there was no explicit announcement for this either on their blog or changelogs, according to the main author of the software (as elicited below), this seems to relate to overhead involved in supporting Octave on top of Matlab. Furthermore, as the company seems to have effectively chosen (for their own good reasons, I'm sure) to intentionally follow a direction that explicitly breaks Octave functionality, it cannot be expected to work on this platform even as unsupported software. Therefore the answer to your question is that "no you can no longer install this tool on octave (ubuntu or otherwise)".
Evidence that this software is no longer available for, or compatible with Octave:
Mentions to Octave in the documentation from v1.8 have now disappeared and are exclusive to Matlab (with extra effort towards Matlab backwards compatibily)
The .tar.gz package is no longer an Octave-compatible package.
The main code relies on .p files, which obfuscate the code and are unsupported in Octave
Past releases and source code have disappeared and are no longer available for download, both from sourceforge, official website, and github. Therefore it is not possible to download the octave-compatible v1.8 of the tool either.

Install GreenPAK Designer RPM

I am attempting to install closed source software from Silego, GreenPAK Designer, on a machine running Fedora 19. The supported installation packages on Silego's Website only target Ubuntu and Debian. I downloaded the .deb package and used Alien to convert to an RPM. So far so good, but a dry run of yum install showed dependency errors, which I solved by installing the necessary packages with yum:
qt5-qbase
qt5-qbase-gui
qt5-qtdeclarative
qt5-qtlocation
qwt
Now, yum installed the above libraries in /usr/lib/ but the GreenPAK RPM defaults to /usr/local/bin as the output dir. I figured I could run
sudo yum localinstall --nodeps --noscripts greenpak-designer-x.x.x.rpm
and get a successful install but I received conflict errors relating to dirs such as '/', '/usr', '/usr/bin' etc. I worked around this issue with:
rpmrebuild -pe --notest-install --replacefiles --noscripts greenpak-designer.x.x.x.rpm
and removing the offending lines in the script. It allowed me to install rpm but the software is broken because of dependency issues (not surprisingly). From the system log:
Jan 4 16:06:49 pelican gnome-session[1729]: /usr/local/greenpak-designer/bin/GP5: error while loading shared libraries: libicui18n.so.52: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
The machine has a /usr/lib/libicui18n.so.50
One thing I did not try is rebuilding my shared object cache with ldconfig, which sometimes solves problems with missing .so links when building from source but I don't see how that would apply in this instance (I'm not trying to link object files to libraries, rather simply trying to drop binaries in default install locations, no?)
Of course, I contacted the vendor and begged for an RPM. The contact was helpful but informed me the software folks are on a well deserved break. I thought I'd continue puttering with this in the meantime while I have time.
Any ideas? It seems the solution to this problem would be helpful when trying to install almost any closed source software targeting Debian on a Fedora box.