Installing octave on ubuntu that has already matlab and ptb installed: which steps?

1
Hi,
I would like to install octave on my machine since I want to give a chance to my matlab scripts to work with an open source software. I already have installed matlab and ptb3 with the neurodebian package. What should I do?:
# install octave only, then run the setupsychtoolbox function.
# install the neurodebian package octave-psychtoolbox-3
# it does not matter?

Then do I need to run in octave the linuxconfiguration and the XorgCreator functions?

thanks

Romain
2
XX---In PSYCHTOOLBOX@yahoogroups.com, <mannow1@...> wrote :

Hi,
I would like to install octave on my machine since I want to give a chance to my matlab scripts to work with an open source software. I already have installed matlab and ptb3 with the neurodebian package. What should I do?:
# install octave only, then run the setupsychtoolbox function.
# install the neurodebian package octave-psychtoolbox-3
# it does not matter?

-> After installing octave-psychtoolbox-3 from NeuroDebian you should be set, as you've already configured your system previously via PsychLinuxConfiguration when you set it up for Matlab. Starting octave, it will have PTB-3 ready to use.

-> If you had downloaded PTB from us you'd have had to run SetupPsychtoolbox once from within octave to get ready.

Then do I need to run in octave the linuxconfiguration and the XorgCreator functions?

-> XOrgConf... sets up the display system, no need to do it separately for Octave and Matlab.
-> PsychLinuxConfiguration mostly sets up the system. In the case of Matlab, it also additionally applies some workarounds for Matlab bugs. As you already got PTB running on Matlab, no need to run this again. However, running it anyway wouldn't do any harm, it just would be redundant.

Btw. one thing i always do on octave is adding the "more off;" command to the first line of the ~/.octaverc configuration file. Otherwise octave will run its output through the pager, ie., after each full page of text output to the command window it will wait for a press of the space bar. Matlab defaults to "more off" but octave defaults to "more on". This can be confusing if your script "hangs" for no reason, because you can't see it is waiting for a space keypress.

-mario


thanks

Romain
3
Hm. Shouldn't be neccessary with octave-psychtoolbox-3 from NeuroDebian, but is needed for the version you get via DownloadPsychtoolbox directly from us.

---In PSYCHTOOLBOX@yahoogroups.com, <mannow1@...> wrote :

I had to install liboctave-dev as you told someone else to do so in an other thread, it works fine now.

best
4
Oh right, the non-free package. Forgot about that, that's different.

I probably should give up on providing to many detailed instructions and if's and when's on the Wiki as well and just simplify them to something dumb and straightforward. I hate not providing detailed info about how things work and how to choose, but so far it seems to mostly serve to confuse people about various options.

-mario
5
Hi,
Thanks to your help, I have now a set up that works well on matlab and octave. I had to build a new datapixx.mex file since the one provided with the psychtoolbox seems to be built for octave 3 (?). I had few harmless error messages (ERROR: invalid device for the current device) which disappeared with the new .mex file.

best

Romain
6
Installing octave-dev (or octave-devel ?) would have also worked. This package is needed when installing psychtoolbox for octave from us. As the Datapixx and Eyelink mex files come from "us" although they are delivered by Neurodebians non-free package, they also need that octave-dev package. The package creates a proper symbolic filesystem link from the generic liboctinterp.so name to the liboctinterp library of the appropriate name and version for your system.

I'll try to ask Yaroslav to add that package to the automatically installed packages.
-mario