Installing Octave
*****************

Here is the procedure for installing Octave from scratch on a Unix system.

  * Run the shell script configure.  This will determine the features your system has (or doesn't have) and create a file named Makefile from each of the files named Makefile.in.

     Here is a summary of the configure options that are most frequently used when building Octave:

     --prefix=PREFIX
          Install Octave in subdirectories below PREFIX.  The default value of PREFIX is /usr/local.

     --srcdir=DIR
          Look for Octave sources in the directory DIR.

     --enable-bounds-check
          Enable bounds checking for indexing operators in the internal array classes.  This option is primarily used for debugging Octave.  Building Octave with this option has a negative impact on performance and is not recommended for general use.

     --enable-64
          This is an experimental option to enable Octave to use 64-bit integers for array dimensions and indexing on 64-bit platforms.  You probably don't want to use this option unless you know what you are doing.

          If you use --enable-64, you must ensure that your Fortran compiler generates code with 8 byte signed INTEGER values, and that your BLAS and LAPACK libraries are compiled to use 8 byte signed integers for array dimensions and indexing.

     --enable-shared
          Create shared libraries (this is the default).  If you are planning to use the dynamic loading features, you will probably want to use this option.  It will make your .oct files much smaller and on some systems it may be necessary to build shared libraries in order to use dynamically linked functions.

          You may also want to build a shared version of libstdc++, if your system doesn't already have one.

     --enable-dl
          Use dlopen and friends to make Octave capable of dynamically linking externally compiled functions (this is the default if --enable-shared is specified).  This option only works on systems that actually have these functions.  If you plan on using this feature, you should probably also use --enable-shared to reduce the size of your .oct files.

     --without-blas
          Compile and use the generic BLAS and LAPACK versions included with Octave.  By default, configure first looks for BLAS and LAPACK matrix libraries on your system, including optimized BLAS implementations such as the free ATLAS 3.0, as well as vendor-tuned libraries.  (The use of an optimized BLAS will generally result in several-times faster matrix operations.)  Only use this option if your system has BLAS/LAPACK libraries that cause problems for some reason.  You can also use --with-blas=lib to specify a particular BLAS library that configure doesn't check for automatically.

     --without-ccolamd
          Don't use CCOLAMD, disable some sparse matrix functionality.

     --without-colamd
          Don't use COLAMD, disable some sparse matrix functionality.

     --without-curl
          Don't use the cURL, disable the ftp objects, urlread and urlwrite functions.

     --without-cxsparse
          Don't use CXSPARSE, disable some sparse matrix functionality.

     --without-umfpack
          Don't use UMFPACK, disable some sparse matrix functionality.

     --without-fftw
          Use the included FFTPACK library instead of the FFTW library.

     --without-glpk
          Don't use the GLPK library for linear programming.

     --without-hdf5
          Don't use the HDF5 library for reading and writing HDF5 files.

     --without-zlib
          Don't use the zlib library, disable data file compression and support for recent MAT file formats.

     --without-lapack
          Compile and use the generic BLAS and LAPACK versions included with Octave.  By default, configure first looks for BLAS and LAPACK matrix libraries on your system, including optimized BLAS implementations such as the free ATLAS 3.0, as well as vendor-tuned libraries.  (The use of an optimized BLAS will generally result in several-times faster matrix operations.)  Only use this option if your system has BLAS/LAPACK libraries that cause problems for some reason.  You can also use --with-blas=lib to specify a particular BLAS library that configure doesn't check for automatically.

     --without-framework-carbon
          Don't use framework Carbon headers, libraries and specific source code for compilation even if the configure test succeeds (the default value is --with-framework-carbon).  This is a platform specific configure option for Mac systems.

     --without-framework-opengl
          Don't use framework OpenGL headers, libraries and specific source code for compilation even if the configure test succeeds.  If this option is given then OpenGL headers and libraries in standard system locations are tested (the default value is --with-framework-opengl).  This is a platform specific configure option for Mac systems.

     --help
          Print a summary of the options recognized by the configure script.

     See the file INSTALL for more general information about the command line options used by configure.  That file also contains instructions for compiling in a directory other than where the source is located.

  * Run make.

     You will need a recent version of GNU Make.  Modifying Octave's makefiles to work with other make programs is probably not worth your time.  We recommend you get and compile GNU Make instead.

     For plotting, you will need to have gnuplot installed on your system. Gnuplot is a command-driven interactive function plotting program. Gnuplot is copyrighted, but freely distributable.  The `gnu' in gnuplot is a coincidence---it is not related to the GNU project or the FSF in any but the most peripheral sense.

     To compile Octave, you will need a recent version of GNU Make.  You will also need a recent version of g++ or other ANSI C++ compiler.  You will also need a Fortran 77 compiler or f2c.  If you use f2c, you will need a script like fort77 that works like a normal Fortran compiler by combining f2c with your C compiler in a single script.

     If you plan to modify the parser you will also need GNU bison and flex.  If you modify the documentation, you will need GNU Texinfo, along with the patch for the makeinfo program that is distributed with Octave.

     GNU Make, gcc, and libstdc++, gnuplot, bison, flex, and Texinfo are all available from many anonymous ftp archives.  The primary site is ftp.gnu.org, but it is often very busy.  A list of sites that mirror the software on ftp.gnu.org is available by anonymous ftp from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/GNUinfo/FTP.

     You will need about 1 gigabyte of disk storage to work with when building Octave from source (considerably less if you don't compile with debugging symbols).  To do that, use the command

          make CFLAGS=-O CXXFLAGS=-O LDFLAGS=

     instead of just make.

  * If you encounter errors while compiling Octave, first check the list of known problems below to see if there is a workaround or solution for your problem.  If not, see Trouble, for information about how to report bugs.

  * Once you have successfully compiled Octave, run make install.

     This will install a copy of Octave, its libraries, and its documentation in the destination directory.  As distributed, Octave is installed in the following directories.  In the table below, PREFIX defaults to /usr/local, VERSION stands for the current version number of the interpreter, and ARCH is the type of computer on which Octave is installed (for example, i586-unknown-gnu).

     PREFIX/bin
          Octave and other binaries that people will want to run directly.

     PREFIX/lib
          Libraries like libcruft.a and liboctave.a.

     PREFIX/share
          Architecture-independent data files.

     PREFIX/include/octave
          Include files distributed with Octave.

     PREFIX/man/man1
          Unix-style man pages describing Octave.

     PREFIX/info
          Info files describing Octave.

     PREFIX/share/octave/VERSION/m
          Function files distributed with Octave.  This includes the Octave version, so that multiple versions of Octave may be installed at the same time.

     PREFIX/lib/octave/VERSION/exec/ARCH
          Executables to be run by Octave rather than the user.

     PREFIX/lib/octave/VERSION/oct/ARCH
          Object files that will be dynamically loaded.

     PREFIX/share/octave/VERSION/imagelib
          Image files that are distributed with Octave.

Installation Problems
=====================

This section contains a list of problems (and some apparent problems that don't really mean anything is wrong) that may show up during installation of Octave.

  * On some SCO systems, info fails to compile if HAVE_TERMIOS_H is defined in config.h.  Simply removing the definition from info/config.h should allow it to compile.

  * If configure finds dlopen, dlsym, dlclose, and dlerror, but not the header file dlfcn.h, you need to find the source for the header file and install it in the directory usr/include.  This is reportedly a problem with Slackware 3.1. For Linux/GNU systems, the source for dlfcn.h is in the ldso package.

  * Building .oct files doesn't work.

     You should probably have a shared version of libstdc++.  A patch is needed to build shared versions of version 2.7.2 of libstdc++ on the HP-PA architecture.  You can find the patch at ftp://ftp.cygnus.com/pub/g++/libg++-2.7.2-hppa-gcc-fix.

  * On some alpha systems there may be a problem with the libdxml library, resulting in floating point errors and/or segmentation faults in the linear algebra routines called by Octave.  If you encounter such problems, then you should modify the configure script so that SPECIAL_MATH_LIB is not set to -ldxml.

  * On FreeBSD systems Octave may hang while initializing some internal constants.  The fix appears to be to use

          options      GPL_MATH_EMULATE

     rather than

          options      MATH_EMULATE

     in the kernel configuration files (typically found in the directory /sys/i386/conf.  After making this change, you'll need to rebuild the kernel, install it, and reboot.

  * If you encounter errors like

          passing `void (*)()' as argument 2 of
            `octave_set_signal_handler(int, void (*)(int))'

     or

          warning: ANSI C++ prohibits conversion from `(int)'
                   to `(...)'

     while compiling sighandlers.cc, you may need to edit some files in the gcc include subdirectory to add proper prototypes for functions there.  For example, Ultrix 4.2 needs proper declarations for the signal function and the SIG_IGN macro in the file signal.h.

     On some systems the SIG_IGN macro is defined to be something like this:

          #define  SIG_IGN  (void (*)())1

     when it should really be something like:

          #define  SIG_IGN  (void (*)(int))1

     to match the prototype declaration for the signal function.  This change should also be made for the SIG_DFL and SIG_ERR symbols.  It may be necessary to change the definitions in sys/signal.h as well.

     The gcc fixincludes and fixproto scripts should probably fix these problems when gcc installs its modified set of header files, but I don't think that's been done yet.

     You should not change the files in /usr/include.  You can find the gcc include directory tree by running the command

          gcc -print-libgcc-file-name

     The directory of gcc include files normally begins in the same directory that contains the file libgcc.a.

  * Some of the Fortran subroutines may fail to compile with older versions of the Sun Fortran compiler.  If you get errors like

          zgemm.f:
                  zgemm:
          warning: unexpected parent of complex expression subtree
          zgemm.f, line 245: warning: unexpected parent of complex
            expression subtree
          warning: unexpected parent of complex expression subtree
          zgemm.f, line 304: warning: unexpected parent of complex
            expression subtree
          warning: unexpected parent of complex expression subtree
          zgemm.f, line 327: warning: unexpected parent of complex
            expression subtree
          pcc_binval: missing IR_CONV in complex op
          make[2]: *** [zgemm.o] Error 1

     when compiling the Fortran subroutines in the libcruft subdirectory, you should either upgrade your compiler or try compiling with optimization turned off.

  * On NeXT systems, if you get errors like this:

          /usr/tmp/cc007458.s:unknown:Undefined local
                symbol LBB7656
          /usr/tmp/cc007458.s:unknown:Undefined local
                symbol LBE7656

     when compiling Array.cc and Matrix.cc, try recompiling these files without -g.

  * Some people have reported that calls to shell_cmd and the pager do not work on SunOS systems.  This is apparently due to having G_HAVE_SYS_WAIT defined to be 0 instead of 1 when compiling libg++.

  * On NeXT systems, linking to libsys_s.a may fail to resolve the following functions

          _tcgetattr
          _tcsetattr
          _tcflow

     which are part of libposix.a.  Unfortunately, linking Octave with -posix results in the following undefined symbols.

          .destructors_used
          .constructors_used
          _objc_msgSend
          _NXGetDefaultValue
          _NXRegisterDefaults
          .objc_class_name_NXStringTable
          .objc_class_name_NXBundle

     One kluge around this problem is to extract termios.o from libposix.a, put it in Octave's src directory, and add it to the list of files to link together in the makefile.  Suggestions for better ways to solve this problem are welcome!

  * If Octave crashes immediately with a floating point exception, it is likely that it is failing to initialize the IEEE floating point values for infinity and NaN.

     If your system actually does support IEEE arithmetic, you should be able to fix this problem by modifying the function octave_ieee_init in the file lo-ieee.cc to correctly initialize Octave's internal infinity and NaN variables.

     If your system does not support IEEE arithmetic but Octave's configure script incorrectly determined that it does, you can work around the problem by editing the file config.h to not define HAVE_ISINF, HAVE_FINITE, and HAVE_ISNAN.

     In any case, please report this as a bug since it might be possible to modify Octave's configuration script to automatically determine the proper thing to do.

  * If Octave is unable to find a header file because it is installed in a location that is not normally searched by the compiler, you can add the directory to the include search path by specifying (for example) CPPFLAGS=-I/some/nonstandard/directory as an argument to configure.  Other variables that can be specified this way are CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, FFLAGS, and LDFLAGS. Passing them as options to the configure script also records them in the config.status file.  By default, CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS are empty, CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS are set to "-g -O" and FFLAGS is set to "-O".