OS2 World.Com Forum

Subject  :  Octave for OS/2 : Numerical Calculations
Author  :  AlJoe lidar@gmx.net
Date  :  04 Dec, 2003 on 11:06
Octave <www.octave.org> is a program-package
(GNU licensed) to perform numerical scientifiic
calculations efficiently.

It is developped as (gcc) cpp-UNIX-code and has been
successfully ported to OS/2 (EMX) by Klaus Gebhardt.
I used his port(s) for about 8 years.

Unfortunately around 2000, Klaus left
Univ. of Darmstadt and since that time,
Octave-OS/2 hasn't been updated anymore.

In the meantime the Octave developpers
made a large effort to implement new features
like handling multidimentional arrays/objects
and new methods for solving complicated
Differential Equations effeciently etc...
Hence Klaus' port -which worked fine-
became essentially outdated in the meantime.

The mentioned new powerful features of Octave
brought it quite close to the widely used
(commercial) MatLab <www.mathworks.com> package
and consequently attracted many Win* users.

Currently, the latest Octave package is V2.1.52 .
It is distributed with makefiles, which allow
compilation under Win* (Cygwin gcc package).

Unfortunately, I'm no Unix-2-OS2 guru, because
my focus was solving mathematical problems and
not the system-related problems behind.
I've tried to compile this stuff using EMX-09d
but I didn't succeed.

In the meantime, ports to many ... many operating
systems are available, but OS2 / ecs is missing!
In my opinion OS/2 - community should participate in
such a rapidly developping numerical package.

Can anybody, who has the necessary Unix-2-OS2
skills try to port the Octave > V2.1.52 package
to OS/2 ?
Or even better: provide/implement OS/2
as a target into the makefiles ?


Subject  :  Re:Octave for OS/2 : Numerical Calculations
Author  :  cytan
Date  :  05 Dec, 2003 on 16:34
I'll have a look at it.

Cheng-Yang Tan


Subject  :  Re:Octave for OS/2 : Numerical Calculations
Author  :  Christian Hennecke
Date  :  06 Dec, 2003 on 12:15
It seems that you missed Klaus' update of Octave to 2.0.17 from July 2002. Back then I mailed him because of a problem and he was very responsive. So you may want to try his non-university address fromthat package: gebhkla [at] t-online [dot] de

Subject  :  Re:Octave for OS/2 : Numerical Calculations
Author  :  AlJoe lidar@gmx.net
Date  :  08 Dec, 2003 on 10:49

Christian Hennecke (06 Dec, 2003 13:15):
It seems that you missed Klaus' update of Octave to 2.0.17 from July 2002. Back then I mailed him because of a problem and he was very responsive. So you may want to try his non-university address fromthat package: gebhkla [at] t-online [dot] de

No .. I didn't miss Octave OS/2-Version2.0.17
(stable series). As far as I know, this port is
essentially based on Octave UNIX-Version
V2.1.35 ( developement ) which became quite
obsolete in the meantime. As already mentioned,
a buch of new features were implemented
since mainly since UNIX-version (approx) 2.1.50

1) the most recent 'OctaveForge'-package-
function-scripts aren't compatible anymore
with V2.1.35 ( mainly because of
'varargin' implementation )

2) multiple function-definitions within an Octave
m-script are now allowed. This has'nt been
possible with V2.1.35

3) Multidimensional arrays were introduced
with Octave UNIX V2.1.51 .

4) etc.

Another problem:
Klaus Gebhardt's latest Octave OS/2 ports still
need EMX09C ( note the 'C'! *VERY OLD*) to be
installed in order to compile '*.oct' - files
( Octave's dll - functions ). They cannot be compiled
with more recent EMX09D ( note the 'D'! version ).
Consequentely, I'd to maintain two EMX versions on
my system. This lead quite often to serious trouble.

Thanks for sending the new email address of Klaus.


Subject  :  Re:Octave for OS/2 : Numerical Calculations
Author  :  StevenL
Date  :  12 Dec, 2003 on 00:54
[quote]cytan (05 Dec, 2003 17:34):
I'll have a look at it.

I'm currently using the v2.1.23 development build which appears to be Klaus's last build. If you create a v2.1.50, I'll be glad to test it here.

Several years ago, I started to work on an Octave build with the intent of merging OS/2 support into the Octave base. John Eaton was amenable to this.

Unfortunately I got busy on other projects and never really made much progress. At the time the OS/2 makefiles had a lot of cmd.exe dependencies and had been heavily modified from the Octave standard makefiles. I just didn't have time to rework all of this. However, looking at the v2.1.23 source, it appears a lot of this has already been reworked. Applying the v2.1.23 patches to the current v2.1.50 sources might not be too difficult.

Regards,

Steven


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