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

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

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 even easier way

The MXE-octave package provides a way to compile Octave for different platforms. Dependencies and certain flags are handled automatically.

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).

Debian repositories 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++-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.

if only the native graphics toolkit will be used, gnuplot will not be necessary.

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

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