Re: Migrating to Linux/Octave

[Francis Esmonde-White]

Hi Paul,

That's a great compilation of sources: is it in the wiki? I think it probably should be.

By the way, there is also Knoppix, which makes life very easy in terms of trying/installing linux without needing to do any configuration. Much easier than a standard debian linux install. Just burn & boot from a cd. It'll set up a desktop linux system in very little time (15 minutes from booting the CD, you can have a fully installed system). As a bonus: you will know if things are not to your liking before installing!

Francis Esmonde-White

On 7-Oct-04, at 11:29 AM, Paul Thomas wrote:

> Chris,
>  
> You can, perhaps, stage the process:
>  
> 1) You can get going with Paul Kienzle's octave binary for Windows, albeit an oldish version (2.1.50), by downloading from:
>  
>  http://octave.sourceforge.net/Octave_Windows.htm
> Click on the first link to octave-forge and you will find a series of  downloads: click on octave-2.1.50a.exe
>   
> This is the most reliable of all the Windows binaries that I know of. 
> Clicking on the .exe file from Explorer results in the execution of the install programme - there are one or two questions about install options but it is otherwise very rapid and easy.  It comes with octave-forge, so does most of the things that Matlab does.
>  
> You will find it useful to have an editor that knows about Matlab/octave.  SciTe is probably the most straight forward for Windows users:
>  
> http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html 
>  
> but there is a Windows version of emacs available too:
>  
> http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html
>  
> 2) To dip your toes in Linux, why don't you download Cygwin:
>  
> http://www.cygwin.com ?
>
> This is a form of Linux that runs under Windows.  It will provide you with all the standard Linux tools and, when you are feeling comfortable with it, you can build the latest octave and still have access to Windows.  You can run Xwindows through it and there is even a KDE desktop that works reasonably well under Windows.
>  
> There is a slight problem with the latest version of the gcc compiler suite that makes Cygwin run slowly for some operations ( what one might call fortran-like octave code).  When you get to that stage, the problem might be sorted, or one of us can provide you with an older version of the compilers.
>  
> An alternative, at this stage, is to install Dirk Eddelbuetel's Quantian from:
>  
> http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html
>  
> This is designed for those doing numeric/scientific work and is packed with goodies, including octave-2.1.57 (at the moment), octave-forge , atlas and fftw
>  
> 3) Finally, when you are feeling really comfortable, download one of the the Linux distributions and load it in parallel with Windows.  This is the configuration that I use.  I bought a second hard-drive and installed Linux on that.  Lilo allows one to switch between the two at boot time.  I have a partition on the Windows drive that serves as a communication space between the two.
>  
> Sorry if I let the verbosity get out of hand but it seemed a good idea to suggest a route-map to you!
>  
> Paul Thomas