Octave for Windows HOWTO

[Agustin Barto]

A lot of people asked me about the procedure from which I build the a 
newer version of the Octave for Windows stand-alone package. Here goes:

a) Install a basic cygwin enviroment using the setup tool.
b) Install octave and octave-forge using the setup tool. Before 
proceding I manually remove gnuplot and any X11 and graphic libs 
dependencies. This has to be done manually selecting the proper list 
from the installer (iirc it was the "Partial" list). After the all the 
packages are selected as "Skip" from the list, the installer will 
complain about octave depending on gnuplot. Click on the checkbox at the 
bottom of the dialog to continue anyway.
c) Download the native version of gnuplot from gnuplot.sf.net and copy 
all the binaries to the /bin of the cygwin dir (I don't the docs). Copy 
pgnuplot.exe to gnuplot.exe, so octave could find it (this can also be 
done from octave config files, but I couldn't remember exactly how).
d) Install rxvt from the setup tool.
e) Copy start_octave.sh from octave-forge to the cygwin dir. It doesn't 
matter where 'cause it's only referenced by the nsis script, which has 
to be modified anyway. There is a problem with symlinks and the nsis 
install builder (don't know exactly why), so in the script you have to 
change octave.exe to octave-2.1.72.exe. Also you need to add the full 
system (cygwin) path to the PATH variable, so cygwin can locate the dlls.
f) Copy an octave icon to the cygwin dir. I used the xcalc icon from the 
Nuvola collection.
g) Modify the octave-forge nsis script to make it work with the new 
directory structure (octave is no longer installed at 
/opt/octave-VERSION and some of the registry entries needed 
modifications as well). I'll upload the script (along with all the 
modified files) as soon as I get home.
h) Build the package using nsis with the modified script.

If you look at the procedure you'll notice that I didn't remove anything 
from the cygwin enviroment. Perhaps some useless packages can be 
manually deleted to save some space.



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