Problem with Symbolic package in octave-forge 2004.07.07

[grumpy steve]

Hi

I’m a real novice, so please be very patient with me if I say something stupid.  You are, however, permitted to laugh if I say something inadvertently funny – all I would ask is that you let me in on the joke!

I’ve been trying to get octave 2.1.57 + octave-forge 2004.07.07 working on my WinXP PC using a very recent download of Cygwin.  Most things work well, and I am altogether hugely impressed.  However, sadly, one of the packages in which I’m most interested, the symbolic package from octave-forge, is proving more stubborn, almost certainly because I don’t know how to build it properly.  I have downloaded, built and installed cln-1.1.8, GiNaC-1.2.1, and octave-forge, and I did end up with a “symbols.oct” file on the appropriate path, along with a large number of “.oct” files symbolically linked to it.  However, whenever I try to execute any of the functions in the symbols.oct, I get the message “error: dlopen: Win32 error 998”.  I have a strong suspicion that something hasn’t linked correctly, meaning that symbols.oct is broken, and quite possibly, incomplete, but such is my ignorance I don’t have the slightest idea how to fix it.  I could try rebuilding everything starting off with different options to the configure step, or, heaven forbid, start messing about with makefiles, but given the time it takes to build everything, it might be a very long time before I get anywhere.

All suggestions welcome, and all ridicule tolerated.

Steve