gretl for Windows comes in the form of a self-extracting executable, gretl-1.8.7.exe (Jan 24, 2010 , about 9MB). Just download and run this: you will be prompted for the location to install the program (the default is c:\Program Files\gretl). The program has mostly been tested on Windows XP; it should work OK on all NT-based versions of Windows (that is, NT4, 2000, XP or Vista; but not Win9X or Windows ME).
The link above is to the latest official release. Another possibilility is to download the current "snapshot" of gretl: gretl_install.exe. This is likely to be somewhat more up to date: sometimes it will contain bug-fixes, and sometimes it will contain newly introduced bugs! Translations into languages other than English are likely to be incomplete. What's new in the snapshot? Take a look at the Change log (the "in progress" entry).
If you want to run gretl on older versions of Windows you can use version 1.6.5 of the program (requires Windows 98 or higher).
Optional extras you may wish to install:
X-12-ARIMA (seasonal adjustment, ARIMA models) |
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TRAMO/SEATS (seasonal adjustment, ARIMA models) |
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Datasets for Wooldridge, Introductory Econometrics |
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Datasets for Gujarati, Basic Econometrics |
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Datasets + scripts for Stock and Watson, Introduction to Econometrics |
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Datasets for Davidson and MacKinnon, Econometric Theory and Methods |
The above are all self-extracting installers. You must install gretl before installing the extra items.
The executables were cross-compiled under GNU/Linux using mingw32 and GTK for Windows (thanks Tor Lillqvist!). The free installer program is courtesy of Jordan Russell.
Besides English, gretl supports French, Italian, Spanish, German, Basque, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish and Russian. Normally it shouldn't be necessary to do anything special to get gretl to appear in the local language: the program comes with the full set of translations, and they should be used automatically, based on the language setting of your computer. In some circumstances, however, it may be necessary to adjust your language setting to achieve the expected effect. This can be done in the Windows control panel.
When updating an existing installation of gretl, it's a good idea to first run the uninstaller program unins000.exe, which you should find in the main gretl folder. This will ensure that you don't get odd behavior due to "stale" DLLs or Windows registry settings. Note that running the uninstaller will not touch any files you have created in the gretl/user folder, but it will erase any customizations you have made using the Preferences menu so you'll have to re-establish these when you start the new version of the program.
There's a page of advice here for anyone wanting to configure gretl for Windows to be run over a network, as in a computer lab setting.
If you want to build gretl for Windows yourself, download the gretl source package (go here to find the latest one) and take a look in the win32 sub-directory. You will find there a Makefile for the Windows version: it is actually designed for cross-compiling gretl on Linux but it shouldn't be too hard to modify it for building on Windows, particularly if you're using the mingw32 compiler.