Re: Octave-3.4.0.dmg + XQuartz = broken Octave & Matlab

[Miriam Heller]

On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 10:26 PM, Alexander Hansen <address@hidden> wrote:

>> My political activities (I'm a neighborhood Team Leader) and my meeting with my Coursera Study Group are over. I am devoting the remainder of time I have (until the homework is due) to getting Octave to run.
>>
>> *** I hope this was not a bad move, but I upgraded my OS to Mac OSX to Version 10.8.1. ***
>>
>> Will your recommendation below, i.e.,
>>
>>   http://wiki.octave.org/Octave_for_MacOS_X
>>
>> using either Fink or MacPorts to manage Applications still work with this Version?
>>
>> Miriam
>
> Miriam, when you reply please type your response at the bottom of the page.  This mail list uses the bottom posting standard.
>
>       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_posting#Bottom-posting
>
> The posting style you're using is called top-posting:
>
>       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_posting#Top-posting
>
> For historical reasons and because we've been using email and usenet since the 1970's, this mailing list generally dislikes top-posting.
>
> Regarding Octave, I suggest you try Fink (for the reasons I mentioned above).
>
>       http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/package.php/octave362
>
> Notice, there is a version for MacOS 10.8
>
> Bne
>
>

We've even got Octave-3.6.3 (I just added it a moment ago as I write
this).  My primary machine is on 10.8.1, and so I believe I've fixed the
major issues for 10.8.

I can answer any questions specific to Fink's packaging of Octave.
--
Alexander Hansen, Ph.D.
Fink User Liaison
My package updates: http://finkakh.wordpress.com/

Alexander,

I'm taking you up on your offer. It's now 4 hours later and I still don't have Octave installed. Now I can't install Fink. Like I said - I understand double-click .dmg files. THAT's IT. I'm close to crying and dropping the course. The 1-2 hour interaction intervals is not fun. 

So I clicked on a download for OS X 10.5-10.8, whch was fink-0.34.2 and now have the file: fink-0.34.2.tar.gz (and an automatically created folder with lots of files in it.

Lacking any better instructions, I went to Fast Track instructions. The first instruction is:

Start out by copying the fink-0.9.0-full.tar.gz file to your home folder. But this isn't what I was told to get and I don't know where to get this version. Also, what is my "home folder."

Then they tell me to: "open Terminal.app and follow the session below.
Computer output is in normal face, your input is in
bold face (or otherwise highlighted).

What Terminal.app are they talking about? The only terminal I know about is the one I get if I type "terminal" in the Spotlight window. Yes I know I'm clueless. That's why this is so frustrating.

I thought I installed Xcode 4.4. What is that? Where is it? Where is it supposed to be?

The Fast Tract instructions go on: 
The actual input prompts from the shell may vary, and some chunks of
the output have been omitted (...).

[frodo:~] testuser% tar xzf fink-0.9.0-full.tar.gz
[frodo:~] testuser% cd fink-0.9.0-full
[frodo:~/fink-0.9.0-full] testuser% ./bootstrap /sw

Welcome to Fink.

Huh? frodo? Help?

Miriam