Installing Octave

**userdce** · April 10th, 2012

Here is PPA also
https://launchpad.net/~picaso/+archive/octave

**PC_load_letter** · May 30th, 2012

This is AWESOME! I was trying to compile from source and I was hit by:

Code:

configure: error: A BLAS library was detected but found incompatible with your Fortran 77 compiler settings.

I posted the output from ./configure on the Octave forum before I saw this thread here. Many thanks.

**mju.cat** · July 29th, 2012

Hi all,
I'm an ubuntu newbie who's trying to get some matlab code to run in octave, but I keep running into problems with installing the latest version (Octave 3.6). I'm running 12.04 Precise and I installed it after running

apt-add-repository -y ppa

icaso/octave

Whenever I try to install packages for octave I get an error which says:
'make: mkoctfile not found'

After a little google-ing, I learnt that I'm supposed to install headers - the only problem is I was unable to find explicit instructions on how to do this for Octave 3.6!

simply typing in
sudo apt-get install octave-devel
or
sudo apt-get install octave3.6-headers

doesn't work at all. It simply returns an "unable to find package".

I'm pretty desperate to get this to work - I need the xlswrite function (>=Octave3.4) so I can't use Octave3.2 which seems to work on 12.04.
Any help on getting mkoctfile to work would be really appreciated!

**PGScooter** · July 30th, 2012

Hi mju.cat,

A good way to solve "<file> could not be found" problems is to install the program apt-file:

Code:

sudo apt-get install apt-file
apt-file find mkoctfile

For me this gave back
octave3.2-common
and
octave3.2-headers

But I see that you don't want version 3.2. Maybe this will find a package with an updated version of that file for you because you have the ppa (apt-file searches through all of your repos). Then after you find the package, install it.

Please post back if you find an answer. Good luck!

**hackTHEgibson** · August 8th, 2012

Originally Posted by mju.cat

Whenever I try to install packages for octave I get an error which says:
'make: mkoctfile not found'

Sounds like you need to install the liboctave-dev.

Code:

sudo apt-get install liboctave-dev

xlswrite is part of the io package so you need to get the source if you don't already have it.
http://octave.sourceforge.net/io/index.html

After downloading you can compile it in octave with.

Code:

sudo octave

The following commands must be executed inside a rooted octave.

Also your octave working directory must be the one with the io tarball. To check working directory type pwd you will get something like ans = /home/user Then cd into io directory if not already there.
Next.

Code:

pkg install io-1.0.18.tar.gz -auto

The -auto modifier, tells the package manager to load that specific package when octave starts.

**hackTHEgibson** · August 16th, 2012

Hi mju.cat,

There is a tutorial on this at http://embeddedprogrammer.blogspot.c...untu-1204.html

Also another way of doing this is in Synaptic.

First sort by Origin. Then click on the appropriate PPA. Now you can easily see which files, from that PPA, you have installed and which ones you don't.

**OldNovice** · October 27th, 2012

I'm just a beginner, but this seems to be what you want:

http://embeddedprogrammer.blogspot.i...untu-1204.html

I'm just trying it out now, having been assured by forum member
danielbauwens that this source is kosher. It seems to run just fine.

By the way, the nice graphical interface QtOctave seems to have been abandoned
by its developer, and cannot be used with octave versions beyond 3.2.
If you install it using sudo apt-get, it will uninstall Octave and reinstall Octave 3.2