Octave for Debian systems
For Debian, and Debian based distributions such as Ubuntu, specific solutions.
Pre-compiled binaries
Distribution repositories
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 library and required to install some 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's Personal Package Archive (PPA)
However, for some Ubuntu releases the octave packages are old (Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu 12.04 or older only have Octave version 3.2). The GNU Octave Team on Launchpad maintain a PPA providing a binary packages of the latest stable versions of Octave for all versions of Ubuntu. 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
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 the configure options.
Dependencies
The easy way
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 best way is to select and install all the dependencies as listed in the INSTALL.OCTAVE file. The following are their package names in Debian repositories (they will have their own dependencies which your package maintainer will solve automatically).
libhdf5-serial-dev. However, the msh package requires gmsh which is incompatible with it.- build tools
g++ gcc gfortran make
- external packages
libblas-dev liblapack-dev libpcre3-dev
- optional but strongly recommended. Check the Octave manual for more information on them. Packages marked with * are virtual packages (you'll have to pick one of the displayed versions).
Dependency Debian Squeeze(Old Stable) Ubuntu 13.10 ARPACK libarpack2-dev libarpack2-dev cURL libcurl4-gnutls-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev epstool epstool epstool FFTW3 libfftw3-dev libfftw3-dev fig2dev transfig transfig FLTK libfltk-dev * libfltk-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 GraphicsMagick++ libgraphicsmagick++-dev libgraphicsmagick++-dev HDF5 libhdf5-serial-dev libhdf5-serial-dev Java JDK openjdk-7-jdk openjdk-7-jdk LLVM llvm-dev * llvm-dev * lpr lpr lpr makeinfo texinfo texinfo OpenGL libgl-dev * libgl-dev * pstoedit pstoedit pstoedit Qhull libqhull-dev libqhull-dev QRUPDATE libqrupdate-dev libqrupdate-dev QScintilla libqscintilla2-dev libqscintilla2-dev Qt libqt4-dev libqtcore4 libqtwebkit4 libqt4-network libqtgui4 libqt4-dev libqtcore4 libqtwebkit4 libqt4-network libqtgui4 SuiteSparse libsuitesparse-dev libsuitesparse-dev Xft libxft-dev libxft-dev zlib zlib1g-dev zlib1g-dev mpc libmpc-dev libmpc-dev
Building development version
If you are building development versions, you'll require some more packages as listed on etc/HACKING and INSTALL. Many of them will already be installed on your system.
- development tools
autoconf automake bison flex gperf gzip libtool perl rsync tar
- extra dependencies for the development version
- None at the moment