Re: Installing Octave 2.9.9 on a Mac

[Joe Koski]

on 12/19/06 11:49 AM, Christian T. Steigies at address@hidden wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 19, 2006 at 02:03:14PM +0100, Matthias Brennwald wrote:
>> Dear all,
>> 
>> after the recent talk on the Octave help list about installing 2.9.9
>> on Macs I thought I'd give it a try, too. Since it seems a less-than-
>> optimal idea to combine the HPC binary with the HMUG version of
>> Octave forge I tried the following:
>> 
>> 
>> 1. Install the HMUG version of Octave 2.9.9.
>> I downloaded the archive from http://www.hmug.org/pub/MacOS_X/BSD/
>> Applications/Math/octave/octave-2.9.9-2-osx4-ppc.tar.gz and tried to
>> install it according to the instructions at http://www.hmug.org/pub/
>> MacOS_X/BSD/Applications/Math/octave/README.octave-2.9.9-2.osx4-
>> ppc.html . That failed miserably:
>> 
>> Pizza:~/Desktop mbrennwa$ mv octave-2.9.9 /tmp
>> Pizza:~/Desktop mbrennwa$ sudo make install
>> Password:
>> Sorry, try again.
>> Password:
>> make: *** No rule to make target `install'.  Stop.
>> 
>> 
>> 2. Compiling from sources.
>> I downloaded the sources from ftp://ftp.octave.org/pub/octave/
>> bleeding-edge/octave-2.9.9.tar.gz and tried to install it according
>> to the instructions in INSTALL:
>> 
>> Pizza:~/Desktop/octave-2.9.9 mbrennwa$ ./configure
>> ....lots of stuff here....
>> checking for rl_set_keyboard_input_timeout in -lreadline... no
>> configure: WARNING: I need GNU Readline 4.2 or later
>> configure: error: this is fatal unless you specify --disable-readline
>> 
>> I have readline installed from Fink.
>> 
>> 
>> Can someone help me sort this out?
> 
> I don't do OSX, but maybe you are just missing the readline _headers_? In
> debian that would be libreadline5-dev or something similar.
> 
> Christian

Christian,

For some reason, the thing that Apple calls libreadline.dylib is really a
symbolic link to libedit.dylib. Apple also has a very old automake utility.
Their automake works for octave, but has problems with the new gnuplot.
Let's hope that Apple upgrades their "developer tools" a bit when OS X 10.5
is introduced next year.

Joe