Compiling Octave 3.8&n…

http://blogs.bu.edu/mhirsch/2013/12/compiling-octave-3-8/

Note: The octave stable PPA finally (Apr 20 2014) has Octave 3.8.1.

https://launchpad.net/~octave/+archive/stable

I would recommend the normal user on Ubuntu 12.04 to consider using the PPA above, it will be much easier than the manual process below.
——————————————————————————————————————–
Download source:
wget -P ~/Downloads http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/octave/octave-3.8.2.tar.bz2

Extract to directory:
tar -C ~/Downloads -xvf ~/Downloads/octave-3.8*.tar.bz2

Prerequisites  (Ubuntu 13.10):
sudo apt-get install gfortran debhelper automake dh-autoreconf texinfo texlive-latex-base texlive-generic-recommended epstool transfig pstoedit libreadline-dev libncurses5-dev gperf libhdf5-serial-dev libblas-dev liblapack-dev libfftw3-dev texi2html less libpcre3-dev flex libglpk-dev libsuitesparse-dev gawk ghostscript libcurl4-gnutls-dev libqhull-dev desktop-file-utils libfltk1.3-dev libgl2ps-dev libgraphicsmagick++1-dev libftgl-dev libfontconfig1-dev libqrupdate-dev libarpack2-dev dh-exec libqt4-dev libqscintilla2-dev default-jdk dpkg-dev gnuplot-x11 libbison-dev libxft-dev llvm-dev

Prerequisites (Ubuntu 12.04.4):
sudo apt-get install gfortran debhelper automake dh-autoreconf texinfo texlive-latex-base texlive-generic-recommended epstool transfig pstoedit libreadline-dev libncurses5-dev gperf libhdf5-serial-dev libblas-dev liblapack-dev libfftw3-dev texi2html less libpcre3-dev flex libglpk-dev libsuitesparse-dev gawk ghostscript libcurl4-gnutls-dev libqhull-dev desktop-file-utils libfltk1.3-dev libgl2ps-dev libgraphicsmagick++1-dev libftgl-dev libfontconfig1-dev libqrupdate-dev libarpack2-dev dh-exec libqt4-dev libqscintilla2-dev default-jdk dpkg-dev gnuplot-x11 libbison-dev libxft-dev

Note: for Ubuntu 12.04, you will have to get LLVM 3.2 Binaries and extract somewhere — you’ll manually link to these in the configure step below.
E.g.
wget -P ~/Downloads http://llvm.org/releases/3.2/clang+llvm-3.2-x86_64-linux-ubuntu-12.04.tar.gz
tar -C ~/Downloads xvf ~/Downloads/clang+llvm-3.2-x86_64-linux-ubuntu-12.04.tar.gz


——–


cd ~/Downloads/octave-3.8.1

 

(Ubuntu 13.10)

./configure --enable-jit --prefix=/opt/octave3.8


(Ubuntu 12.04.4)
./configure --enable-jit --prefix=/opt/octave3.8 LLVM_CONFIG=~/Downloads/clang+llvm-3.2-x86_64-linux-ubuntu-12.04/bin/llvm-config

You may get the error:
configure: WARNING: JAVA_HOME environment variable not initialized. Auto-detection will proceed but is unreliable.
On my Ubuntu 13.10 PCs, Java was found automatically despite this error.


make

This takes about 30 minutes to compile on a Sandy Bridge i7-2600 CPU.


make check

I get:
PASS 11503
FAIL 0
XFAIL 7


sudo make install
sudo ln -s /opt/octave3.8/bin/octave /usr/local/bin/octave3.8


Now to run Octave 3.8 with GUI, at Terminal type:
octave3.8 --force-gui

You can of course make a bash alias to always add that –force-gui for you.

nano ~/.bash_aliases
and add the line
alias octave38="octave3.8 --force-gui"

Notes re: LLVM version:
Ubuntu 13.10 llvm-dev is currently LLVM 3.2. As of this comment from mtmiller on January 2014, Octave 3.8 requires LLVM 3.2 or 3.3 to compile:

https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?41061#comment9

Ubuntu 12.04 defaults to LLVM 2.9, which is now too old for Octave 3.8. I would suggest considering the Pre-Built Binaries

Note: Ubuntu 14.04 has Octave 3.8 by default – yay!

Note: As Ian notes in the comments, surf() seems to be broken with the otherwise fast and great FLTK plotting. As Ian notes, when you need surf(), circumvent this problem by falling back to gnuplot by typing in Octave:
graphics_toolkit('gnuplot')

Reference (Jordi G. H.):

http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/Please-release-RC1-to-octave-unstable-PPA-td4659924.html