Octave under Windows in a teaching environment.

[Yann Le Du]

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,

--
Yann Le Du
http://yledu.free.fr