MXE

MXE-Octave was forked 2012 from the MXE project and is useful for building Octave in the following scenarios:

1. Cross-compilation for MS Windows (see also Windows_Installer) and other platforms.
2. Building Octave on outdated Linux systems (e.g. only an old GCC version is available).
3. Building Octave without root permission.

MXE-Octave is not the best choice for building Octave, if your system already provides recent versions of GCC and other required build dependencies. See Category:Installation for other install options.

Example of compiling MXE-Octave

Preparation

1. Install all requirements of MXE Octave.
2. Decide for an installation directory (e.g. ~/mxe-octave).
3. cd ~
4. hg clone https://hg.octave.org/mxe-octave mxe-octave
5. cd mxe-octave
6. ./bootstrap

Configuration

./configure \
    --prefix=$HOME/mxe-octave \
    --enable-native-build \
    --enable-octave=release \
    --enable-64 \
    --enable-fortran-int64 \
    --enable-pic-flag \
    --enable-openblas \
    --enable-jit

For a comprehensive list of configuration options with a short explanation, type ./configure --help.

On some older systems, it might be useful to consider adding the options --disable-docs --disable-system-opengl --disable-system-x11-libs --disable-java in case of building errors.

Build

make all openblas JOBS=4 (adapt the value of the variable JOBS to your needs).

Replace reference BLAS by OpenBLAS

In general using the OpenBLAS library results in faster matrix-vector operations compared to the reference BLAS library.

1. cd ~/mxe-octave/usr/lib
2. mv libblas.so libblas.so.reference
3. ln -s libopenblas.so libblas.so

Run

1. MXE-Octave will exist in ~/mxe-octave/usr/bin
2. Add the command octave as alias to your .bashrc file: alias octave=~/mxe-octave/usr/bin/octave
3. Start MXE-Octave by typing octave.

Note for gnuplot

The gnuplot built by mxe-octave does not support cairo based terminals and lua/tikz terminals. If you want uses those feature, prepare gnuplot with those features and points its location setting to "gnuplot_binary" like

 >> gnuplot_binary /usr/bin/gnuplot