Help with 2.9.9

[Vic Norton]

I have just installed Octave 2.9.9 on a Mac Power PC OS X 10.4 via High 
Performance Computing. So far it does not work.

Problem 1. I don't know how to set the LOADPATH anymore. I had a .octavrc file 
in my home directory that read
   cd ~/octave;
   PS1 = "\\s> ";
   LOADPATH = [LOADPATH, ':~/octave/oct//:~/octave/m//'];

This worked fine in Octave 2.73. Now I get the error messages
   error: `LOADPATH' undefined near line 3 column 13
   error: evaluating assignment expression near line 3, column 10
   error: near line 3 of file `/Users/vic/.octaverc'
   octave:1> 

Question 1. How do I set my LOADPATH now? How do I set PS1 to what I want?

Problem 2. Things were working fine in 2.73, but I switched to 2.9.9 in hopes 
of being able to solve triangular systems efficiently using the "matrix_type" 
fuction. My first test of the function was with this code:
   R = [
      1  2
      2  4
   ];
   matrix_type(R)
   matrix_type(R, 'upper')

The response:
   ans = Positive Definite
   ans =

      1   2
      2   4

   warning: Invalid matrix type

So far so bad! (1) Obviously the matrix is NOT postive definite.

Question 2. How do you set the matrix_type?

The documentation reads (in part)
   -- Loadable Function: A = matrix_type (A, 'upper', PERM)
It seems to me that 'upper' IS a valid matrix type. And no, the problem is not 
because R is not upper triangular. The same error occurs if  R = [ 1 0; 0 4]. 
And capitalizing the first letter to 'Upper' makes no difference either.


Thanks for any advice you can give me.   - Vic