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I installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on my Dell Vostro laptop and then tried installing GNU octave using the following commands:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:octave/stable

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install octave

After the installation, when I type octave in the terminal I get the octave critical error message:

 **Octave critical error**

 **The settings file /home/siva/.config/octave/qt-settings does not exist and can not be created. Make sure that you have read and write permissions to /home/siva/.config/octave**

**Octave GUI must be closed now.**

Can someone please help me fix this problem?

Linuxuser001
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Siva
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    Can you do ls -dl /home/siva/.config/octave and let us know what it says? – edwinksl Sep 16 '16 at 08:48
  • drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 16 12:52 /home/siva/.config/octave – Siva Sep 16 '16 at 10:17
  • Thanks for the clarification. /home/siva/.config/octave should not be owned by root, so I am not sure what you did. Nonetheless, I wrote an answer below to fix it. – edwinksl Sep 16 '16 at 10:18

2 Answers2

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From the comments, ls -dl /home/siva/.config/octave shows that the directory is owned by root, but it should have been owned by siva. To fix this, run:

sudo chown -R siva:siva /home/siva/.config/octave

Your Octave installation should now proceed without permission problems.

edwinksl
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If you have gksu installed, in a terminal do gksu nautilus ~/.config then locate a folder named octave, right click, choose Properties, and under Permissions tab, change the Owner and Group to your username, and also change their Access to Create and delete files. Inside octave folder there is a file named qt-settings, do the same as you do on octave folder, but change the Access to Read and write.

If you don't have gksu, just install it: 

sudo apt-get install gksu

This also works for Ubuntu 16.04

Zanna
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Vincent Dhawu
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