popularizing Octave (was "windows version of Octave")

[Mike Miller]

On Mon, 23 May 2005, Jonathan Stickel wrote:

> I think there is partly a disconnect between users and developers here, 
> especially for windows users.  Many new users want octave to "just work" 
> in windows, but I bet most developers and advanced users use linux.


After reading this list for a few years, I'm fairly confident of the 
following conclusions:

(1) It is not easy for most people to get Octave and Octave-Forge running 
on their system.  This is especially true of the most recent releases.

(2) There are many ways to prepare and install Octave (depending on BLAS, 
etc.) and this confuses people.

(3) Plotting is probably the trickiest thing to do within Octave.


If a "newbie" goes to this page...

http://www.octave.org/download.html

...he is confronted with a very large number of options.  Even if he knows 
that he wants the Windows version, he has three choices, but not a lot of 
information on how those choices differ.  The README.Windows file looks 
like a very nice, step-by-step overview of the process, but look at how 
long and involved it is:

ftp://ftp.octave.org/pub/octave/README.Windows


It is great to have many choices, but, at the same time, this large number 
of choices is a hassle for new users to wade through.  If we want more 
people to use Octave, I think we should try very hard to make it easy to 
get started.  We should have a *single* recommended approach for new users 
with a Windows system.  It might still be a difficult install, but at 
least they won't ask us which is best.

It is a lot of work, but if someone with expertise was willing to put 
together a better introduction to installation issues, I think it would be 
a huge help.  It does seem to be a moving target and there are several OSs 
to deal with, but if we want people to use Octave, we have to remove as 
many barriers as possible.

By the way, I am still running Octave 2.0.14 on my old Solaris box because 
everytime I tried to install a newer version it failed to compile.  I may 
be doing something wrong but I don't know what that is and it hasn't been 
easy to get help.

Mike



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