OctaveForGNULinux

CategoryInstall

Debian

Determine what packages are currently available, using e.g.

$ aptitude search octave

As of 2008/05, the command above should list, amongst others:

• octave3.0 - GNU Octave language for numerical computations (3.0 branch)
• octave3.0-doc - PDF documentation on the GNU Octave language (3.0 branch)
• octave3.0-emacsen - Emacs support for the GNU Octave language (3.0 branch)
• octave3.0-headers - header files for the GNU Octave language (3.0 branch)

Select your choice of packages, then install them, e.g. w/

# aptitude install octave3.0 octave3.0-doc octave3.0-emacsen

Notes:

• For brevity, the numerous other Debian packages have been omitted in the above list.
• At a minimum, one should install one of the packages returned by the command:

$ aptitude search ?provides\(^octave$\)

• The OctaveForge packages are spread over many Debian packages. All OctaveForge packages will probably be found with the command:

$ aptitude search ?description\(octave-forge\)

DebianDevelopmentSources

In order to build Octave from development sources, the first step is to follow the instructions given under the heading Development Sources of [Downloading Octave]. These commands require Mercurial, which can be installed with the command

# aptitude install mercurial

Building Octave from sources requires a number of programs and libraries. All of these are available as Debian packages and the list given on [Debian's source package page for Octave3.2] can be used for reference and installed by

# aptitude build-dep octave3.2

After this, it should be possible to follow the BuildFromSource instructions.

DebianVersions

Note that on Debian, multiple versions of Octave are provided concurrently and thus, Octave packages have names that include the version number, such as, for example: octave2.1-emacsen, octave3.0-emacsen, octave3.2-emacsen.

Reference: [Upgrade Ubuntu Jaunty to Karmic (9.04 to 9.10) breaks self-compiled octave]([Gmane copy])

Fedora

Early versions of Fedora included Octave in the core distribution. Since Fedora Core 3, Octave has been included in Fedora Extras (and is generally better maintained now in Extras than it was in Core). The packages can be installed using the yum command, which will automatically download and install the packages along with all of their dependencies.

The related packages are:

• octave
• octave-devel
• octave-forge

octave-forge is recommended to all users, as it provides many extra functions. octave-devel contains the octave headers and mkoctfile script and is really only needed by users who are developing code that is to be dynamically linked to octave. octave and octave-forge can be installed with the command

# yum install octave-forge

By default, yum will most likely install blas and lapack as your matrix math libraries, but ATLAS is usually much faster. If you want to install atlas with octave, use the command

# yum install octave-forge atlas

Note that if you are using an i386-compatible processor the base atlas package is not optimized for newer hardware. If you have newer hardware, you can get even better performance with the atlas-3dnow (AMD K6 processors), atlas-sse (Pentium III or newer), or atlas-sse2 (Pentium 4 or newer).

Gentoo

• Octave is available through Gentoo's package management system, Portage. To install Octave:

# emerge sync
# emerge octave
# emerge octave-forge (optional)

RedHat

• Octave is included with RedHat. If you are still using an old version of RedHat and want a newer version of octave, your best options are to consider updating your distribution to a recent Fedora release or compile octave from source.

• Note that RH 7.x distributions (as well as RedHat Enterprise Linux 2.1) have included an old version of GCC (pre 3.x). It is known that GCC 2.96 (included in RH7.3) can compile octave (as of version 2.1.57), but the resulting binary will be bad. RedHat made available RPMs for GCC 3.1-5 through http://rhn.redhat.com (those RPMs may be available on other RPM repositories).

SuSE

• Octave 2.1.36 is included with SuSE 8.1.
• The ATLAS libraries are not included, for some reason, but the atlas.rpm for SuSE 7.3 (in the beo section) will install without problems.