Re: Octave under Windows in a teaching environment.

[Muthiah Annamalai]

Yann Le Du wrote:
> Hello,
>
> First, I'd like to say I'm a big fan and user of Octave, and am impressed 
> by it's development.
>
> Now, I'd like to report here a few, yet annoying, problems encountered 
> when using "Octave 2.9.19 for Windows Installer" available on the 
> Octave-Forge website under the name "octave-2.9.19-setup.exe".
>
> This installer was used to install Octave on around 20 different laptops, 
> some Vista, some XP, some Mac OS X, belonging to students to whom 
> Matlab/Octave basics are taught.
>
> Now Octave runs ok, except for some annoying problems, which, I think it 
> is important to add, DO NOT OCCUR ON ALL COMPUTERS on which Octave was 
> installed. Some of the problems are :
>
> 1/ the text in legends in plots is not displayed ;
> 2/ saving the plot to a file doesn't write the axis labels or legends ;
> 3/ the Octave window crashes badly sometimes when Ctrl-C is used during a 
> computation ;
> 4/ closing the Octave window with the x close button causes systematic 
> crash of the application.
>
> Basically, the application doesn't have a "polished" look. Now, for me, 
> that's perfectly ok, since I work on Linux, and most of these problems 
> don't exist there, but for teaching purposes on Windows, it's harder to 
> ignore it, since the students stumble on these difficulties.
>
> As for Mac, using the Octave Mac installer, it's a real pain to have 
> everything working properly, and I don't understand why the installer 
> doesn't include the toolboxes as in the Windows installer.
>
> Now, does anyone have some advice ? Is Octave/Cygwin better, more Linux 
> like and thus more stable, even on Vista ? Toolboxes working ok ? 
> Plotting/saving figures ok ?
>
> Many thanks,
>
> --

If you want to submit a bug report be specific and send us
scripts and particular methods how we could reproduce the bug.
Otherwise, Im afraid generic broad bugs dont stand a chance
to be fixed.

Also you should try the latest 3.0.0 Octave release. See in the
dowloads section at, https://sourceforge.net/projects/octave

HTH,
-Muthu