Building

General information about building the Octave source for different operating systems.

We try to keep build instructions up to date in the source tree. Please clone using Mercurial or download it to see the README.

There are also instructions in the manual.

There is a page for Debian/Ubuntu users here.

There is a page for Arch Linux users here.

Dependencies

Critical
Recommended
Not critical

Task	Name	Usage	Debian	Level
Build tools	C++, C, and Fortran compilers	Compiling the source code	build-essential
	GNU Make	Makefile processor	make
	AWK, sed, and other Unix utilities	Miscellaneous tasks	awk, sed, ...
	Bison	Parser generator	bison
	Flex	Lexical analyzer	flex
	Autoconf	Software configuration	autoconf
	Automake	Makefile generator	automake
	Libtool	Dependency of automake	libtool
External tools	BLAS	Basic Linear Algebra Subroutine library	libatlas-base-dev
	LAPACK	Linear Algebra Package	liblapack-dev
	PCRE	Perl Compatible Regular Expression library	libpcre3-dev
	GNU Readline	Command-line editing library	libreadline-dev
	ARPACK	Solution of large-scale eigenvalue problems	libarpack2-dev
	cURL	Library for transferring data with URL syntax	curl
	FFTW3	Library for computing discrete Fourier transforms	libfftw3-dev
	FLTK	Portable GUI toolkit	libfltk1.3-dev
	fontconfig	Library for configuring and customizing font access	fontconfig
	FreeType	Portable font engine	libfreetype6-dev
	GLPK	GNU Linear Programming Kit	libglpk-dev
	gnuplot	Interactive graphics program	gnuplot
	GraphicsMagick++	Image processing library	libgraphicsmagick++1-dev
	HDF5	Library for manipulating portable data files	libhdf5-dev
	OpenGL	API for portable 2D and 3D graphics	-
	Qhull	Computational geometry library	libqhull-dev
	QRUPDATE	QR factorization updating library	libqrupdate-dev
	SuiteSparse	Sparse matrix factorization library	libsuitesparse-dev
	zlib	Data compression library	zlib1g-dev