Expand installation instructions for use in VS Code or explain why it cannot be done

[joelmiller]

I have been editing my jupyter notebooks within VS Code. I'd like to have some of my notebooks run Octave, but I have not been able to figure out how to get xeus-octave to run within VS Code.

Is this possible? If so, I would certainly benefit from instructions.

[wudl-21]

Having a similar problem on Windows 11. Currently my workflow is as follows:

1. Open a jupyter notebook in VS Code on Windows
2. Open WSL, start jupyter server with xeus-octave and xoctave kernelspec installed
3. In VS Code, paste the url and connect to that existing server
4. Select Octave (xoctave) as kernel

All the steps above work just fine, but whenever I start to run some Matlab code, I hit the run button of the cell then jupyter will try to connect to the kernel and the server gives the following error message:

Kernel started: 47a89d2e-db35-49b1-bbc1-9deba1cca4ec
Instantiating kernel
Core instantiated
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'octave::execution_exception'
  what():  feval: function 'graphics_toolkit' not found

after a while:

AsyncIOLoopKernelRestarter: restarting kernel (1/5), keep random ports
Instantiating kernel
Core instantiated
Timeout waiting for kernel_info reply from 47a89d2e-db35-49b1-bbc1-9deba1cca4ec

and finally in the cell output:

Failed to start the Kernel. 
The Jupyter notebook server failed to launch in time. 

Looks like the kernel cannot find a certain package at the initial starting. This problem might be specific to xeus-octave because I also have xeus-cling installed in WSL and follows the same workflow which does not have any problem.