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 for the full functionality (including JIT Compiler and so on) just execute (as root):

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

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.