Octave for Debian systems

For Debian, and Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu, specific solutions.

Pre-compiled binaries

Binary packages for Octave and many Octave-Forge packages are provided by all versions of Debian and Ubuntu. These are the most well-tested binaries available and should work best for most users.

sudo apt-get install octave

Aside the octave package that installs GNU Octave, other pieces of it are split over multiple packages. These are octave-doc, octave-info, and octave-htmldoc for the documentation; liboctave-dev for the octave development header files and mkoctfile (required to install Octave Forge packages); and octave-dbg for the debugging symbols.

For Debian stable users, there may also be newer packages available in backports, so don't forget to check there.

Octave packages

Many Octave packages are also distributed by your Linux distribution. These are tested to work the best with your Octave version. For example:

sudo apt-get install octave-control octave-image octave-io octave-optim octave-signal octave-statistics

Octave's Personal Package Archive (PPA) for Ubuntu

For some Ubuntu releases the Octave packages are too old (Ubuntu 12.04 only has Octave version 3.2). The GNU Octave Team on Launchpad maintains a PPA providing more up to date packages of Octave for all versions of Ubuntu. These are backported from Debian unstable (the Ubuntu Octave Team needs help testing and preparing the packages so if you can help with this, contact Mike Miller). To set up your system to install these packages:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:octave/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install octave

Linuxbrew

It is possible to install the current stable version of Octave and any needed dependencies within your home directory, particularly useful if you have an old Linux distribution or do not have root access, using Linuxbrew:

ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Linuxbrew/install/master/install)"
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.linuxbrew/bin:$PATH"' >>~/.bash_profile
brew install homebrew/science/octave

Compiling from source

The only tricky part is to install the dependencies. Once that is solved, installing from source should be as easy as ./configure && make && make install. See the manual for configure options and below for some common examples.

Install dependencies

Note that different Debian and Ubuntu versions may have slightly different package names but their differences should be pretty small, mostly limited to version numbers.

The easy way (but likely incorrect)

This approach is only suitable if you are building from source the same version that your Linux distribution already has packaged.

The easy way to install most of the necessary dependencies is to sudo apt-get build-dep octave. This will install all packages necessary to build and prepare a Debian package for the octave version available on your system repositories. However:

• will install unnecessary packages related to the building of a Debian package;
• may miss some new dependencies;
• may install packages that are no longer octave dependencies.

The even easier way (but experimental)

The MXE-octave package provides a way to compile Octave for different platforms. Dependencies and certain flags are handled automatically.

The right way

The right way is to select and install all the dependencies as listed in the INSTALL.OCTAVE file (if it is not in your source tree build it doing make INSTALL.OCTAVE). The following are their package names in Debian repositories (they will have their own dependencies which your package manager will solve automatically). If you are building development versions, you'll require some more packages as listed on etc/HACKING.md and INSTALL. Many of them will already be installed on your system. Install the dependencies by typing

sudo apt-get install

followed by the package names of the table below.

Dependency	Debian 8 Jessie (stable)	Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus (LTS)
Required build tools
C compiler	gcc	gcc
C++ compiler	g++	g++
Fortran compiler	gfortran	gfortran
GNU make	make	make
Required external packages
BLAS	libblas-dev	libblas-dev
LAPACK	liblapack-dev	liblapack-dev
PCRE	libpcre3-dev	libpcre3-dev
Strongly recommended. Check the Octave manual for more information.
ARPACK	libarpack2-dev	libarpack2-dev
cURL	libcurl4-gnutls-dev	libcurl4-gnutls-dev
epstool	epstool	epstool
FFTW3	libfftw3-dev	libfftw3-dev
fig2dev	transfig	transfig
FLTK	libfltk1.3-dev	libfltk1.3-dev
fontconfig	libfontconfig1-dev	libfontconfig1-dev
FreeType	libfreetype6-dev	libfreetype6-dev
gl2ps	libgl2ps-dev	libgl2ps-dev
GLPK	libglpk-dev	libglpk-dev
GNU Readline	libreadline-dev	libreadline-dev
gnuplot	gnuplot	gnuplot-x11
GraphicsMagick++	libgraphicsmagick++1-dev	libgraphicsmagick++1-dev
HDF5	libhdf5-serial-dev	libhdf5-serial-dev
Java JDK	openjdk-7-jdk	openjdk-8-jdk
libsndfile	libsndfile1-dev	libsndfile1-dev
LLVM	llvm-dev	llvm-dev
lpr	lpr	lpr
makeinfo	texinfo	texinfo
OpenGL	libgl1-mesa-dev	libgl1-mesa-dev
OSMesa	libosmesa6-dev	libosmesa6-dev
pstoedit	pstoedit	pstoedit
PortAudio	portaudio19-dev	portaudio19-dev
Qhull	libqhull-dev	libqhull-dev
QRUPDATE	libqrupdate-dev	libqrupdate-dev
QScintilla	libqscintilla2-dev	libqscintilla2-dev
Qt	libqt4-dev libqtcore4 libqtwebkit4 libqt4-network libqtgui4 libqt4-opengl-dev	libqt4-dev libqtcore4 libqtwebkit4 libqt4-network libqtgui4 libqt4-opengl-dev
SuiteSparse	libsuitesparse-dev	libsuitesparse-dev
Texlive	texlive	texlive
Xft	libxft-dev	libxft-dev
zlib	zlib1g-dev	zlib1g-dev
Required to build from development sources
Autoconf	autoconf	autoconf
Automake	automake	automake
Bison	bison	bison
Flex	flex	flex
gperf	gperf	gperf
gzip	gzip	gzip
icoutils	icoutils	icoutils
rsvg-convert	librsvg2-bin	librsvg2-bin
libtool	libtool	libtool
perl	perl	perl
rsync	rsync	rsync
tar	tar	tar

To install all of these on Ubuntu 16.04, type

sudo apt-get install gcc g++ gfortran make libblas-dev liblapack-dev libpcre3-dev libarpack2-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev epstool libfftw3-dev transfig libfltk1.3-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfreetype6-dev libgl2ps-dev libglpk-dev libreadline-dev gnuplot-x11 libgraphicsmagick++1-dev libhdf5-serial-dev openjdk-8-jdk libsndfile1-dev llvm-dev lpr texinfo libgl1-mesa-dev libosmesa6-dev pstoedit portaudio19-dev libqhull-dev libqrupdate-dev libqscintilla2-dev libqt4-dev libqtcore4 libqtwebkit4 libqt4-network libqtgui4 libqt4-opengl-dev libsuitesparse-dev texlive libxft-dev zlib1g-dev autoconf automake bison flex gperf gzip icoutils librsvg2-bin libtool perl rsync tar

To install all of these on Ubuntu 18.10, type (Needs more testing)

sudo apt-get install gcc g++ gfortran make libblas-dev liblapack-dev libpcre3-dev libarpack2-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev epstool libfftw3-dev transfig libfltk1.3-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfreetype6-dev libgl2ps-dev libglpk-dev libreadline-dev gnuplot-x11 libgraphicsmagick++1-dev libhdf5-serial-dev openjdk-8-jdk libsndfile1-dev llvm-dev lpr texinfo libgl1-mesa-dev libosmesa6-dev pstoedit portaudio19-dev libqhull-dev libqrupdate-dev libqscintilla2-dev libsuitesparse-dev texlive libxft-dev zlib1g-dev autoconf automake bison flex gperf gzip icoutils librsvg2-bin libtool perl rsync tar qtbase5-dev    qttools5-dev qttools5-dev-tools  libqscintilla2-qt5-dev

or, for Debian 8 stable,

sudo apt-get install gcc g++ gfortran make libblas-dev liblapack-dev libpcre3-dev libarpack2-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev epstool libfftw3-dev transfig libfltk1.3-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfreetype6-dev libgl2ps-dev libglpk-dev libreadline-dev gnuplot libgraphicsmagick++1-dev libhdf5-serial-dev openjdk-7-jdk libsndfile1-dev llvm-dev lpr texinfo libgl1-mesa-dev libosmesa6-dev pstoedit portaudio19-dev libqhull-dev libqrupdate-dev libqscintilla2-dev libqt4-dev libqtcore4 libqtwebkit4 libqt4-network libqtgui4 libqt4-opengl-dev libsuitesparse-dev texlive libxft-dev zlib1g-dev autoconf automake bison flex gperf gzip icoutils librsvg2-bin libtool perl rsync tar

or, for Debian 9 stable,

sudo apt-get install gcc g++ gfortran make libblas-dev liblapack-dev libpcre3-dev libarpack2-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev epstool libfftw3-dev transfig libfltk1.3-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfreetype6-dev libgl2ps-dev libglpk-dev libreadline-dev gnuplot libgraphicsmagick++1-dev libhdf5-serial-dev openjdk-8-jdk libsndfile1-dev llvm-dev texinfo libgl1-mesa-dev libosmesa6-dev pstoedit portaudio19-dev libjack-jackd2-dev libqhull-dev libqrupdate-dev libqscintilla2-dev libqt4-dev libqtcore4 libqtwebkit4 libqt4-network libqtgui4 libqt4-opengl-dev libsuitesparse-dev texlive libxft-dev zlib1g-dev autoconf automake bison flex gperf gzip icoutils librsvg2-bin libtool perl rsync tar

• The Debian repositoriy has several libraries for dealing with HDF data files. The recommended is libhdf5-serial-dev. However, the msh package requires gmsh which is incompatible with it.
• The GraphicsMagick++ library (libgraphicsmagick++1-dev) on the Debian repositories was compiled with quantum 8 which limits reading images to 8 bit. The solution is to recompile GraphicsMagick with quantum 16 or 32 before building Octave.
• For debian9 using openjdk-9-jdk (even providing JAVA_HOME) could *not* be used for the java interface! Use openjdk-8-jdk instead.
• When configure decides to use QT5 instead of QT4, make might fail because lrelease is missing (see bug 50580). It can be fixed by installing qttools5-dev-tools

Obtaining the Source

The source code for Octave releases can be obtained as a tarball from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/octave/. The source code for development versions is available by cloning the mercurial repository.

Bootstrap

If you are building development versions instead of an actual Octave release, you will need to run the ./bootstrap script.

Configuration

As mentioned above, Octave can be compiled with the default settings using ./configure && make && make install. You can also tweak the setup using configure options. Some examples are given below for a Linux system.

64 bit

To get 64-bit indexing requires all linked libraries to support 64-bit variables. You can omit most of these except BLAS which gives a fatal error. This is remedied by compiling OpenBLAS with edits to its Makefile.rule so that BINARY=64 INTERFACE64=1.

./configure LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/OpenBLAS/lib CPPFLAGS=-I/opt/OpenBLAS/include LDFLAGS=-L/opt/OpenBLAS/lib --enable-64

Java

Autodetection for java should work well on Debian-based systems. A specific Java version can be specified by passing JAVA_HOME to configure, for example

 ./configure JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64

HDF5

On current versions of Debian and Ubuntu, you may get the following warning when building an older version of Octave from source:

HDF5 library not found.  Octave will not be able to save or load HDF5 data files.

The problem is that there are multiple versions of the hdf5 package. Octave was written with the serial version in mind but it is likely to work with the others (OpenMPI and Mpich). Due to the naming scheme done in Debian, it may be required to specify the location of the libraries. See bug #38928 for details (starting with comment #19) but basically, use the following when running configure:

 ./configure --with-hdf5-includedir=/usr/include/hdf5/serial --with-hdf5-libdir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/hdf5/serial

On older versions of Debian and Ubuntu, where only one flavor of the HDF5 library could be installed at a time, you may need to build Octave against one of the MPI-enabled flavors. On these older systems, configuring Octave like this may work:

 ./configure CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/include/mpi -DMPICH_SKIP_MPICXX -DOMPI_SKIP_MPICXX"