octave: Running Configure and Make
E.2 Running Configure and Make
==============================
• 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:
‘--help’
Print a summary of the options recognized by the configure
script.
‘--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-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. 
Compiling Octave with
64-bit Indexing, for more details about building Octave with
this option.
‘--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.
‘--disable-docs’
Disable building all forms of the documentation (Info, PDF,
HTML). The default is to build documentation, but your system
will need functioning Texinfo and TeX installs for this to
succeed.
‘--enable-float-truncate’
This option allows for truncation of intermediate floating
point results in calculations. It is only necessary for
certain platforms.
‘--enable-readline’
Use the readline library to provide for editing of the command
line in terminal environments. This option is on by default.
‘--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.
‘--with-blas=<lib>’
By default, configure looks for the best BLAS matrix libraries
on your system, including optimized 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.) Use this option to
specify a particular BLAS library that Octave should use.
‘--with-lapack=<lib>’
By default, configure looks for the best LAPACK matrix
libraries on your system, including optimized implementations
such as the free ATLAS 3.0, as well as vendor-tuned libraries.
(The use of an optimized LAPACK will generally result in
several-times faster matrix operations.) Use this option to
specify a particular LAPACK library that Octave should use.
‘--with-magick=<lib>’
Select the library to use for image I/O. The two possible
values are "GraphicsMagick" (default) or "ImageMagick".
‘--with-sepchar=<char>’
Use <char> as the path separation character. This option can
help when running Octave on non-Unix systems.
‘--without-amd’
Don’t use AMD, disable some sparse matrix functionality.
‘--without-camd’
Don’t use CAMD, disable some sparse matrix functionality.
‘--without-colamd’
Don’t use COLAMD, disable some sparse matrix functionality.
‘--without-ccolamd’
Don’t use CCOLAMD, disable some sparse matrix functionality.
‘--without-cholmod’
Don’t use CHOLMOD, disable some sparse matrix functionality.
‘--without-curl’
Don’t use the cURL library, disable the ftp objects, ‘urlread’
and ‘urlwrite’ functions.
‘--without-cxsparse’
Don’t use CXSPARSE, disable some sparse matrix functionality.
‘--without-fftw3’
Use the included FFTPACK library for computing Fast Fourier
Transforms instead of the FFTW3 library.
‘--without-fftw3f’
Use the included FFTPACK library for computing Fast Fourier
Transforms instead of the FFTW3 library when operating on
single precision (float) values.
‘--without-glpk’
Don’t use the GLPK library for linear programming.
‘--without-hdf5’
Don’t use the HDF5 library, disable reading and writing of
HDF5 files.
‘--without-opengl’
Don’t use OpenGL, disable native graphics toolkit for
plotting. You will need ‘gnuplot’ installed in order to make
plots.
‘--without-qhull’
Don’t use Qhull, disable ‘delaunay’, ‘convhull’, and related
functions.
‘--without-qrupdate’
Don’t use QRUPDATE, disable QR and Cholesky update functions.
‘--without-umfpack’
Don’t use UMFPACK, disable some sparse matrix functionality.
‘--without-zlib’
Don’t use the zlib library, disable data file compression and
support for recent MAT file formats.
‘--without-framework-carbon’
Don’t use framework Carbon headers, libraries, or specific
source code even if the configure test succeeds (the default
is to use Carbon framework if available). This is a platform
specific configure option for Mac systems.
‘--without-framework-opengl’
Don’t use framework OpenGL headers, libraries, or specific
source code 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.
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 the one where
the source is located.
• Run make.
You will need a recent version of GNU Make as Octave relies on
certain features not generally available in all versions of make.
Modifying Octave’s makefiles to work with other make programs is
probably not worth your time; instead, we simply recommend
installing GNU Make.
There are currently three options for plotting in Octave: the
external program gnuplot, the internal graphics engine using OpenGL
coupled with either FLTK or Qt widgets. Gnuplot is a
command-driven interactive function plotting program.
To compile Octave, you will need a recent version of ‘g++’ or other
ANSI C++ compiler. In addition, you will 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.
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>.
Octave requires approximately 1.4 GB of disk storage to unpack and
compile from source (significantly less, 400 MB, if you don’t
compile with debugging symbols). To compile without debugging
symbols try the command
make CFLAGS=-O CXXFLAGS=-O LDFLAGS=
instead of just ‘make’.
Installation Problems:: for a list of known problems and 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/octave-VERSION’
Libraries like liboctave.a and liboctinterp.a.
‘PREFIX/octave-VERSION/include/octave’
Include files distributed with Octave.
‘PREFIX/share’
Architecture-independent data files.
‘PREFIX/share/man/man1’
Unix-style man pages describing Octave.
‘PREFIX/share/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/libexec/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.
Info Catalog
octave: Build Dependencies
octave: Installation
octave: Compiling Octave with 64-bit Indexing