Scite 2.03 is immovable on the desktop!

After trying out drpython, I installed scite and run it. But bad luck struck under Ubuntu. The editor screen cannot be moved! It was immobile on the left side of the screen and I cannot strangely zoom it. So another editor bit the dust in our Ubuntu natty narwhal OS powered desktop!

Note: Feb. 19, 2012. I looked at scite and since I have upgraded to Ubuntu oneiric ocelot OS version, Scite is working properly.

Dr Python is a nice lightweight Python editor but there is something wrong with screen rendering.

The following image shows that the screen rendering of drpython leaves much to be desired.

You have to scroll down and up so that the screen will be properly rendered.

Octobet 30, 2011: The funny and erroneous black bars have disappeared! after a few updates!

Alternative sites for information on free-software.

I will start collecting some urls which are good sources for free-software. The first esteemed entry is

1. Free Software Foundation Directory
2. Feeding the Snake
3. PyPi: Python directory of applications.Almost all are FREE!
   

As usual, most posts I have written are works in progress.

Installing Gretl in Ubuntu Natty

I get segmentation fault on startup of gretl. Here are some steps I took to make it run again
on my 64 bit ACER laptop. Download the 1.9.5 source code by clicking on

sourceforge: gretl

The actual download site link I got was

http://nchc.dl.sourceforge.net/project/gretl/gretl/1.9.5/gretl-1.9.5.tar.bz2

and if you prefer the command line(with a network connection!)

wget -ct0 http://nchc.dl.sourceforge.net/project/gretl/gretl/1.9.5/gretl-1.9.5.tar.bz2,

but that is not recommeded as the actual download site may be too busy!


Now go to the directory where the bzip file is, and unpack it with

tar xjvvf gretl-1.9.5.tar.bz2

then, goto the gretl-1.9.5 directory, and perform the standard

./configure; make; make install

incantation to compile and install from source files.


Here are some errors I got when compiling the sources:

../lib/src/gretl_fft.c:22:19: fatal error: fftw3.h: No such file or directory

Fix: install libfftw3 development files.(libfftw3-dev)

../lib/src/monte_carlo.c:40:17: fatal error: gmp.h: No such file or directory

Fix: install gmp development files. (libgmp3-dev)

Typing gretl on the command line does not do anything! So we type gretl again and the TAB key:
gretl
gretl gretlcli gretl_x11

Trying out gretlcli,

toto@toto-Aspire-4520:~/Downloads/gretl-1.9.5$ gretlcli
gretlcli: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libgretl-1.0.so.0: undefined symbol: omp_get_wtime

So back to installing omp (open MP). Fix: install libgomp-1-dbg

Darn, I still get the error!

gretlcli: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libgretl-1.0.so.0: undefined symbol: omp_get_wtime

So I thought that that we remove some remaining packages which are not in use anymore.

sudo apt-get autoremove.

Now we get a sweet response from grelcli:

gretlcli
gretl version 1.9.5
Copyright Ramu Ramanathan, Allin Cottrell and Riccardo "Jack" Lucchetti
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
Current session: 2011-09-09 09:45
gretl is process 20218, '/usr/local/bin/gretlcli'
gretldir is maybe '/usr/local/share/gretl/'?

"help" gives a list of commands
Type "open filename" to open a data set
? ^C

and typing gretl now give us a more familiar qui (from our experience with previous versions).

I ahve upgraded to the newest Ubuntu distribution Oneiric Ocelot and gretl seems to work ("seemst to") because I have to spend more time with this econometrics software.