Jack,

Oops! As I say, in response:

* at least on my laptop, the audio was a bit crackling; perhaps you'll want to speak a little farther away from the mike

The audio could have been considerably de-burred, I must admit. The sound cut-outs weren't great, either. I use an internal mike from one port and I'm still experimenting with Vokoscreen, so I shall do some more tinkering when making future videos.

* instead of copying-and-pasting the long URL from sourceforge, you can just "wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gretl/gretl-1.10.2.tar.xz"; wget should "get" the redirection and work straight away

* a very desirable consequence of building your home-baked version of gretl is that you'll have it optimised for your machine. On modern PCs, for example, you may take advantage of multiple CPUS and have a few operations (such as matrix products or random-effects probit, for example) run faster. In order to enable this, you'll have to
add the --enable-openmp option to ./configure

* also, if you add the --enable-build-doc option and run "make pdfdocs" after "make", you'll also have updated versions of the pdf files, which can be handy

All three of these are excellent tips which I'd no idea of (no doubt, you'll tell me I should have RTFM more closely). Thanks!

* again, parallel is good; you can cut down build time dramatically by giving the "-j" option to make, as in, for example "make -j2", or "make -j4"

Which -make -j*- option would you recommend?

* some users may worry about all those warnings during build; in most cases, they're totally harmless

* a quicker way to perform a version check: just do "cli/gretlcli -v" instead of "gui2/gretl_x11", so you use the CLI client instead, which is much quicker

* to get the CVS version, the way the video shows is the best one, but if you're feeling impatient you may also navigate to "http://gretl.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/gretl/gretl/" and download the tarball. However, keep in mind that we'll probably be switching from CVS to git soon.

Again, thanks for these excellent tips. Will you please tell us Linux users know exactly how we should get Git updates from our terminals when you announce it?

* to see what's new, you may either go to "Help>About>News", or open http://gretl.sourceforge.net/ChangeLog.html.

Like an idiot, I realised straight away I should have said this on review of the video.

* it may be nice to remind that we have an active community who's willing to help and say something about the mailing lists.

Agreed.

Thanks again for your nice work!

No problem, you're welcome. Now here's a tip for you: why not incorporate all of these steps into the next version of the User Guide? That way, all newcomers have a clear point-by-point 'guide within a guide' to work with. :)

Yours,

Clive Nicholas