No Octave kernel choice in Jupyter after install

[profbrady]

Help. I have an Ubuntu 14.04 VM on my Mac to test the installation of Anaconda3 with Jupyter and octave_kernel. I ran the Anaconda3 installer and changed the .bashrc to inlcude the path and set my python3 alias to match the Anaconda python3 executable. Ran conda install jupyter. Ran pip install metakernel and pip install octave_kernel and both ran with no errors. However, when I start Jupyter I only have the choice of a Python3 kernel. What went wrong? How can I get an Octave kernel selection?

Brian Brady

[IanLondon]

I had the same issue on Linux Mint 17.1 64-bit, conda 3.19.0 - though I don't think I got any pip install ... errors. My R kernel works fine, but Octave doesn't show up in the Jupyter notebooks selection.

[dsblank]

You can use "jupyter kernelspec list" to see what and where kernels are
installed.

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 12:23 PM, Ian London notifications@github.com
wrote:

I had the same issue on Linux Mint 17.1 64-bit, conda 3.19.0 - though I
don't think I got any pip install ... errors. My R kernel works fine, but
Octave doesn't show up in the Jupyter notebooks selection.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#32 (comment)
.

[profbrady]

I seem to have stumbled across a solution. I put the following in ~/.local/share/jupyter/kernels/octave/kernel.json

{"argv":
["/home/{username}/anaconda3/bin/python",
"-m", "octave_kernel",
"-f", "{connection_file}"],
"codemirror_mode": "Octave",
"display_name": "Octave",
"language": "octave"
}

Initially I put this in ~/.ipython/kernels/octave/kernel.json but it did not seem to work. I removed that directory and found the other location by accident, but it worked.

I installed Octave 4.0 but made sure that octave pointed to octave-cli not the gui version. Everything works now.

Brian Brady

[blink1073]

Hi @profbrady, we were relying on a non-wheel install to install the kernel spec, but pip has started converting tarballs to wheels before installing them. I released a new version with a 2-step installation method that works around the problem (see the new readme).

[leftaroundabout]

After installing the Octave kernel, I also didn't get an Octave option in the New menu. However, it turned out that the Octave kernel did work just fine, it just wasn't listed – I could start jupyter console --kernel octave and also open existing Octave notebooks. Only after that, Octave now also shows up as a New option.

Strange but, oh well, it works now.

[blink1073]

Hi @leftaroundabout, agreed, do you now see it in jupyter kernelspec list?

[leftaroundabout]

@blink1073 I saw it it jupyter kernelspec list right from the start, just not in the New menu of the browser window of jupyter notebook.

[blink1073]

Wow, can't say I know what that could mean.

[RicardoGranados]

Hello, I have installed with conda the octave kernell.
jupyter kernelspec list
Available kernels:
octave /home/kiro/.local/share/jupyter/kernels/octave
python3 /home/kiro/.local/share/jupyter/kernels/python3

When I do jupyter notebook I received
[nb_conda_kernels] enabled, 3 kernels found
and in the browser I can find the Octave Kernel but if I try to launch the kernel the GUI of Octave executes and Jupyter does not work with Octave.

I am using Ubuntu 16.04
anaconda with python 3.5
jupyter 4.3

I am kind of new with Linux and Jupyter. But I believe is something like ProfBrady said before about pointing to octave-cli and not octave but really don't know how to do that.
Thank you very much

[blink1073]

Hi @RicardoGranados, what is the output of which octave; which octave-cli; octave --version?

[RicardoGranados]

Hi @blink1073 thank you for answering, I was playing this morning trying to fix, I was trying to install with

pip install octave_kernel python -m octave_kernel.install

But then I tried to instal directly with the oct2py lib,
$ conda install -c conda-forge oct2py

And it is working now, I can plot and work everything in Jupyter at least basic functions and ploting, have not tried anything complex.

But if you could give me a hint about what was happening I would appreciate it. Answering your questions:

which octave
/usr/bin/octave
which octave-cli
/usr/bin/octave-cli
octave --version
/usr/bin/octave

Thank you, and sorry for not trying the other way before asking.
Cheers.

[blink1073]

Hi @RicardoGranados, I honestly do not know why it would not have worked the first time, I would have needed more debug information about your previous install.

[AllenDowney]

I am having this problem with Anaconda on Linux Mint 19.1.

I created a fresh environment and installed octave and octave-kernel from conda-forge:

conda install -c conda-forge octave
conda install -c conda-forge octave_kernel

Now I have octave:

$ which octave; which octave-cli; octave --version
/home/downey/anaconda3/envs/ModSimMatlab/bin/octave
/home/downey/anaconda3/envs/ModSimMatlab/bin/octave-cli
GNU Octave, version 4.2.1

And it's on my list of kernels:

$ jupyter kernelspec list
Available kernels:
  vpython    /home/downey/.local/share/jupyter/kernels/vpython
  octave     /home/downey/anaconda3/envs/ModSimMatlab/share/jupyter/kernels/octave
  python3    /home/downey/anaconda3/envs/ModSimMatlab/share/jupyter/kernels/python3

But when I launch Jupyter, it's not on the New menu, and if I open a notebook that wants the Octave kernel, it says there is no such kernel. The issue is the same in Jupyter Notebook and JupyterLab.

@dsblank Any help you can provide would be appreciated! I am trying to write installation instructions that readers can follow, so trying to keep it simple.