Unless library names change, recompiling the Debian packages on Ubuntu
should be relatively straight-forward.
Hi Thomas,
that is what I hoping for.
Only it wasn't. I spent lots of time, research and experimentation before 'make' finally finished without error.
Please don't get me wrong. Octave is a really great and helpful
software. I use it all the time. Big thanks to all developers and
contributors.
What I try to point out is the difficulties that you run into when you are new to octave.
I happen to know that perspective first hand, as you may have noticed :-) . I ran into many really frustrating problems and with lots of googling and asking the list I was finally able to solve them.
That kind of made me wonder if it is really necessary that it takes so long before everything works. I am talking about technical difficulties, not about getting to know the language and principles of octave. Learning how to use it is unavoidable, the technical issues are not IMHO.
So I thought it might be a good idea to document what I did to get it to work.
The result is the very non-expert script that I posted recently.
The only real virtue of that script is that it addresses every problem that I encountered while compiling from source and that it then straight-forwardly builds octave. Nothing more intended.
Once you get it to work the problems tend to disappear. Mine are beginning to do just that. By then you know what to do and you have the necessary depencies installed etc. After that building octave should be relatively straight-forward.
What I want to address are the very real and time-consuming difficulties you encounter when you start fresh at building octave. And maybe help some other newbie save himself a few days of frustration.
Is that OK?
Stefan
Thomas