Re: Octave 4.2 under Ubuntu 16.04

[Juan Pablo Carbajal]

Hi E.

Please always keep the mailing list in CC
My answers below

On Sun, Feb 5, 2017 at 9:45 PM, E. Terray <address@hidden> wrote:
> Juan -
>
> Thanks very much for your response.
>
> The reason I posted is that I upgraded Ubuntu from 14.04
> to 16.04.  Under 14.04 I had Octave 3.something (3.8 ?)
> running.  That got upgraded to 4.0 (I don't recall whether
> apt did it as part of the OS upgrade or if I did), but my
> recollection is that I had a working version of Octave.
>
Probably the links to the executbale was changed, that's why you did
not see th eolder version.

> For reasons that are not entirely clear to me now, I
> decided to remove and re-install Octave using apt.  I
> think it was because I had a lot of additional packages
> installed under Octave 3.8  and it didn't appear that they
> had similarly been upgraded .  So I also used apt to "purge"
> associated stuff.
>
> After installing Octave 4.0 again from the Ubuntu repository
> I found the odd problem that the command window in the
> GUI is unresponsive.  The editor and help tabs appear to
> work normally - for example, I can open a script file in the
> editor and run it, and graphical output seems to be OK.
> The CLI also works OK (thank goodness).
>
You probably need to remove your local GUI configuration files since
they changed a lot between these two versions
I had a similar issue and got rid of it by removing everything under
~/.config/octave

Be careful, if you have customizations of the gui, just rename the
folder and see if you can port them to the new version.


> I just can't do anything with the command window - totally
> defunct.
>
> I tried removing and installing Octave again (superstitious
> behavior I know) - but I still have the same problem.
>
> I suspect that the "purge" got rid of some critical dependency
> that is not properly restored by installing Octave from the
> Ubuntu repository using apt
>
> My apologies for this long-winded message - it's the
> preamble to my question:  do you know how to fix this
> short of building/installing Octave from scratch?
>
> One other question - if I were to 'make' from the source, is it
> possible (easy?) to arrange EVERYTHING in directories below
> a single topmost directory of my choosing?  I don't know if
> you're familiar with 'anaconda' but that's how things have
> been arranged there.  anaconda will let you have multiple
> versions of Python installed, and it's very nice because all
> of them are branches on a single tree and so you can find
> stuff (unlike the Ubuntu installer which seems to strew
> things all over the place).
>
I might ot have understood your questions, but you can always select
theinstallation folder by setting
the --prefix option of the configure script, e.g. I run configure of
default in the following way

../default/configure --with-hdf5-includedir=/usr/include/hdf5/serial
--with-hdf5-libdir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/hdf5/serial
--prefix=/opt/octave_dev/

> Best regards,
>
>      - Gene Terray
>
>
>
> On 02/05/2017 11:29 AM, Juan Pablo Carbajal wrote:
>
> On Sat, Feb 4, 2017 at 5:45 PM, E. Terray <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> The Octave package maintained by Ubuntu for 16.04
> (64-bit LTS) is Octave version 4.0.0.
>
> Has anyone had experience/success compiling and running
> Octave 4.2 under Ubuntu 16.04 ("Xenial Xerus")?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
>      - E. Terray
>
>
> *********************************************************
> *                                                       *
> *      Dr. Eugene A. Terray <address@hidden>      *
> *      Dept. Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering      *
> *      Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution             *
> *      MS-11,  217 Bigelow,   Woods Hole, MA 02543      *
> *      (508) 289-2438 (voice)  (774) 392-0070 (cell)    *
> *      (508) 457-2194 (fax)                             *
> *                                                       *
> *********************************************************
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Help-octave mailing list
> address@hidden
> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-octave
>
> Hi E.
>
> I compile Octave development branch and stable every week in the
> latest version of Ubuntu. I never found a problem.
> Make sure you first install dependencies, and then add all the missing
> packages that the configure script will point you to, e.g. sometimes
> libscintilla is missing.
>
> Also you can use the stable ppa
> https://launchpad.net/~octave/+archive/ubuntu/stable
>
> but there hasn't been much updates lately. I guess Mike is busy.
>
>