Windows Installer

GNU Octave is primarily developed on GNU/Linux and other POSIX conformal systems. There have been many efforts in the past to build ports of GNU Octave for Windows. Take a look at the various ports of Octave available for Windows here.

Recently some work has been done in maintaining a unified build system mxe-octave (a fork of MXE) which anyone can use to produce cross as well as native builds of GNU Octave for Windows and Mac OS X platforms. This page contains instructions about creating a Windows installer using mxe-octave.

Installing requirements of MXE Octave

MXE Octave requires a recent Unix system where all components as stated below are installed.

Debian (GNU/kFreeBSD & GNU/Linux)

aptitude install -R autoconf automake bash bison bzip2 \
                    cmake flex gettext git g++ intltool \
                    libffi-dev libtool libltdl-dev openssl libssl-dev \
                    libxml-parser-perl make patch perl \
                    pkg-config scons sed unzip wget \
                    xz-utils yasm

On 64-bit Debian, install also:

aptitude install -R g++-multilib libc6-dev-i386

If you are using Ubuntu, then you can do apt-get install foo instead of aptitude install -R foo.

Fedora

yum install autoconf automake bash bison bzip2 cmake \
            flex gcc-c++ gettext git intltool make sed \
            libffi-devel libtool openssl-devel patch perl pkgconfig \
            scons yasm unzip wget xz

FreeBSD

pkg_add -r automake111 autoconf268 bash bison cmake \
           flex gettext git gmake gsed intltool libffi libtool \
           openssl patch perl p5-XML-Parser pkg-config \
           scons unzip wget yasm

Frugalware

pacman-g2 -S autoconf automake bash bzip2 bison cmake \
             flex gcc gettext git intltool make sed libffi libtool \
             openssl patch perl perl-xml-parser pkgconfig \
             scons unzip wget xz xz-lzma yasm

Gentoo

emerge sys-devel/autoconf sys-devel/automake \
       app-shells/bash sys-devel/bison app-arch/bzip2 \
       dev-util/cmake sys-devel/flex sys-devel/gcc \
       sys-devel/gettext dev-vcs/git \
       dev-util/intltool sys-devel/make sys-apps/sed \
       dev-libs/libffi sys-devel/libtool dev-libs/openssl sys-devel/patch \
       dev-lang/perl dev-perl/XML-Parser \
       dev-util/pkgconfig dev-util/scons app-arch/unzip \
       net-misc/wget app-arch/xz-utils dev-lang/yasm

Mac OS X

Install Xcode 4 and MacPorts, then run:

sudo port install autoconf automake bison cmake flex \
                  gettext git-core gsed intltool libffi libtool \
                  openssl p5-xml-parser pkgconfig scons \
                  wget xz yasm

Mac OS X versions ≤ 10.6 are no longer supported.

MingW

Make sure to update and upgrade packages as some of the default versions of packages are too old to work correctly.

mingw-get update
mingw-get upgrade

And then get required packages.

mingw-get install autoconf bash msys-bison msys-flex gcc gcc-c++ \
                  gcc-fortran gettext msys-m4 msys-make msys-sed \
                  libiconv msys-openssl msys-patch msys-perl \
                  msys-libarchive msys-unzip msys-wget msys-bsdtar
   

You will also need to install Windows versions of Python and Ghostscript and ensure they are in visible in the PATH.

OpenSUSE

zypper install -R autoconf automake bash bison bzip2 \
                  cmake flex gcc-c++ gettext-tools git \
                  intltool libffi-devel libtool make openssl \
                  libopenssl-devel patch perl \
                  perl-XML-Parser pkg-config scons \
                  sed unzip wget xz yasm

On 64-bit openSUSE, install also:

zypper install -R gcc-32bit glibc-devel-32bit \
                  libgcc46-32bit libgomp46-32bit \
                  libstdc++46-devel-32bit

Steps to create Windows Installer

1. Install all requirements for compiling GNU Octave. (Some help for Debian users)
2. hg clone http://hg.octave.org/mxe-octave/
3. cd mxe-octave
4. autoconf
5. ./configure
6. ./mk-dist --installer