Octave for Debian systems

• This article addresses the installation and Building of GNU Octave on Debian, and Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu.

Binary packages for GNU 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. To install them, run:

sudo apt-get install octave

In Debian and Ubuntu the "complete" GNU Octave software is split over multiple packages. To obtain the complete features of Octave, install additionally

• 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.

Many Octave packages are also distributed by Debian and Ubuntu. These are tested to work the best with the respective Octave version. Install them via:

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

Up to 2018, the GNU Octave Team on Launchpad actively maintained a PPA providing more up to date packages of Octave. These are backported from Debian unstable and are still useful for older Ubuntu installations. To set up your system to install these packages, run:

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

Building Octave

For general build instructions, see Building.

The only tricky part is to install the Octave build dependencies. Once that is solved, one can easily follow the general build instructions. See below for some Debian and Ubuntu specific configuration options.

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 right way

The right way is to install all the dependencies listed on the Building wiki page. One can either search for the respective packages manually on

• https://packages.debian.org
• https://packages.ubuntu.com

or, for the sake of convenience, use some "one-liner" to install them:

• Ubuntu 19.10

sudo apt-get install gcc g++ gfortran make libblas-dev liblapack-dev libpcre3-dev libarpack2-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev epstool libfftw3-dev fig2dev libfltk1.3-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfreetype6-dev libgl2ps-dev libglpk-dev libreadline-dev gnuplot-x11 libgraphicsmagick++1-dev libhdf5-dev openjdk-8-jdk libsndfile1-dev llvm-dev lpr texinfo libgl1-mesa-dev libosmesa6-dev pstoedit portaudio19-dev libqhull-dev libqrupdate-dev libqscintilla2-qt4-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 libsundials-dev

• Ubuntu 18.04 (LTS)

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 texlive-generic-recommended 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

• Ubuntu 16.04 (LTS)

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

• Debian 9

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

• Debian 8

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

• 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

Configuration

Some Debian and Ubuntu specific configure tweaks are listed below:

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 older 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"

Sundials

On recent Debian and Ubuntu releases whose Sundials version (in libsundials-dev) is 3.1, a configure flag needs to be passed for ode15i and ode15s to be compiled with support for sparse Jacobians (bug #55937), as follows:

./configure CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/include/suitesparse"

See also

• MXE -- a more customized Octave build including many self-compiled tools.