Octave for Red Hat Linux systems

For RedHat-based distributions like RedHat, CentOS, Fedora, Scientific Linux ...

Unspecific RH

Tested Fedora 20, but not completely.

 yum install gcc gcc-c++ kernel-devel make mercurial libtool libtool-ltdl-devel libtool-ltdl autoconf cmake lapack-devel \
 lapack pcre-devel readline-devel readline fftw-devel glpk-devel suitesparse suitesparse-devel gnuplot libcurl-devel zlib-devel \
 flex texlive gperf fltk-devel qhull-devel hdf5-devel gl2ps-devel qrupdate-devel arpack-devel qscintilla-devel llvm-devel qt-devel \
 bison ghostscript-devel librsvg2-tools icoutils texlive-metapost

CentOS

Enable use of Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) AND THEN install octave dependencies development packages:

   yum -y install yum-utils
   yum-builddep -y octave
   yum -y install qt-devel mercurial gcc-c++ lapack-devel libtool
   yum -y install epstool transfig pstoedit qscintilla-devel

The arpack-devel package distributed with CentOS 7 (arpack-devel-3.1.3-2.el7.x86_64) seems a bit old, as routine "seupdate" seems not recognized during the "configure" step. This can be solved by installing arpack from github:

   git clone git@github.com:opencollab/arpack-ng.git
   cd arpack-ng
   ./bootstrap
   ./configure --prefix="some local prefix"
   make; make install

Current release as of Aug. 20th 2018 seems to compile OK with CentOS blas-devel

prepare installation of octave

The remaining steps do not need to be done as root, except for possibly the final installation step. I recommend you create an installation directory like /usr/local/octave/VERSION so that it is easy to uninstall a given version simply by removing a directory tree. Then to use the installed version, put /usr/local/octave/VERSION/bin in your PATH. If you create the /usr/local/octave/VERSION directory with appropriate permissions, it is not necessary to be root to install Octave. For example,

   mkdir -p /usr/local/octave/dev
   chown jwe.jwe /usr/local/octave/dev

create src and build directories:

   mkdir src build

get source code of octave and compile it

check out a copy of the octave sources in the src directory

   cd src
   hg clone http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave

• bootstrap the build system

   cd octave
   ./bootstrap

• build Octave in the build directory. choose whatever prefix is appropriate for your system. the -jN option builds in parallel

   cd ../../build
   ../src/octave/configure --prefix=/usr/local/octave/dev
   make -j6 all

• Run the test suite

   make check

• If everything looks OK (a few failures are probably normal for the development version) install it

   make install