Octave for Arch Linux

This page is intended as a quick introduction for building octave on archlinux. For more generic and recent build instructions, take a look at Building.

If you just want to have the latest version of octave and not intend to edit the sources, consider install octave-hg from the AUR. If you want to have a stable version from the repository, just execute

sudo pacman -Syu octave

If you encounter any problems during the build process that are not mentioned here, take a look at https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/octave-hg/?comments=all. Some problems are listed in the comments, new dependencies are easy to extract from the PKGBUILD.

Build dependencies

To install the necessary build dependencies just execute (as root):

pacman -S base-devel pcre mercurial gcc-fortran gperf perl rsync transfig arpack curl fftw fltk glpk glu graphicsmagick hdf5 java-environment qhull qscintilla texinfo gnuplot

Assuming you have yaourt installed, the dependencies from the AUR are installed as follows (as normal user):

yaourt -S gl2ps qrupdate epstool

If you plan to build the documentation, install the following packets too:

pacman -S graphviz doxygen

Building octave

Checkout octave as described in http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/get-involved.html.

It is recommended to build octave within a subdirectory.

./bootstrap
mkdir build
cd build
../configure MOC=moc-qt4 UIC=uic-qt4
make -j3

The only difference from the build on other systems are the parameters given to configure. They are necessary due to a problem with some configuration and the coexistance of qt4 and qt5. For more information take a look at the comments of octave-hg in the AUR.

If you encounter further problems or find more dependencies, feel free to adress them here.