Hi fellow Julia lovers,
I wanted to share how I struggled to get IJulia to work on Windows (8.1) and how all the pieces fell together. This may not be news to experts, but I am sure it may be of use to developers working on Windows. It was all the stranger because IJulia works on Ubuntu 14.04 in a virtual machine on the same computer (as a side remark: Julia works a lot faster in this Ubuntu VM than on the host computer with Windows, especially all operations with Pkg) But on Windows, after I had gone through the whole installation procedure, the IJulia notebook started but when I wanted to evaluate something after a few s the message came*: The kernel appears to have died. It will restart automatically. - ERROR: could not open file C:\Users\CVO\.julia\v0.3\Nettle\src\../deps/deps.jl* Then trying to pinpoint the error, I saw that Pkg.build(“IJulia”) was not successfully completed: *WARNING: LibCURL and Nettle had build errors* Then I tried every suggestion (for weeks of and on) I could find with Pkg, clearing the cache and so on, going through IJulia issues 159 and 198 nothing worked, until I followed a suggestion (which at first didn’t seem related) to: *https://github.com/JuliaLang/WinRPM.jl/issues/27* I did a WinRPM.update() and found that I had the same error as reported in this issue: WinRPM.update() INFO: Downloading http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/windows:/mingw:/win32/openSUSE_Factory//repodata/repomd.xml INFO: Downloading http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/windows:/mingw:/win32/openSUSE_Factory//repodata/8f70e2c263bb70ad72eb0122587216a34bb165e385b0a558447edb518 WARNING: received error 0 while downloading http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/windows:/mingw:/win32/openSUSE_Factory//repodata/8f70e2c263bb70ad72eb0122587216a primary.xml.gz SOLUTION: As mentioned in this issue, there is a problem with the download from opensuse. The suggestion was: Replace the content of the file sources.list in the WinRPM folder %HOME%\.julia\v0.3\WinRPM with this: http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/repositories/windows:/mingw:/win32/openSUSE_Factory/ http://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/repositories/windows:/mingw:/win64/openSUSE_Factory/ At first this did not help, even after restarting, doing a julia> cd(Pkg.dir("WinRPM")) shell>; git reset HEAD --hard changing the url’s in a cache file, etc, the error persisted. Yesterday Jameson Nash suggested to do a: WinRPM.__init__() At first no success, but after I restarted the Windows machine finally WinRPM.update() worked. Then in one stroke Pkg.build worked for LibCURL, Nettle and IJulia And the kernel in IJulia no longer dies! The bottom line I think is that when the WinRPM package installation is smoothened out to work fine on Windows, a lot of Julia package install problems on Windows will be solved. Thanks everyone, Ivo --- Here is the versioninfo() of my Julia installation on Windows: Julia Version 0.3.0-prerelease+3952 Commit b2fd3af (2014-06-30 01:39 UTC) Platform Info: System: Windows (x86_64-w64-mingw32) CPU: AMD FX(tm)-8150 Eight-Core Processor WORD_SIZE: 64 BLAS: libopenblas (USE64BITINT DYNAMIC_ARCH NO_AFFINITY) LAPACK: libopenblas LIBM: libopenlibm Here is the versioninfo() of my Julia installation on Windows: Julia Version 0.3.0-prerelease+3952 Commit b2fd3af (2014-06-30 01:39 UTC) Platform Info: System: Windows (x86_64-w64-mingw32) CPU: AMD FX(tm)-8150 Eight-Core Processor WORD_SIZE: 64 BLAS: libopenblas (USE64BITINT DYNAMIC_ARCH NO_AFFINITY) LAPACK: libopenblas LIBM: libopenlibm
