I checked in some changes and now the basics seem to be working
again. So check out the main development sources from the Mercurial
archive (there are instructions near the bottom of the Octave download
page at http://www.octave.org/download.html) and give it a try.
Some things to be aware of:
Text and image objects don't work.
Colorbars don't work becuase they are images.
3d plots do work. Try "demo ribbon" for example, and maximize the
plot window. I think this looks really good.
Things are looking OK, but there is still a lot of work to do and
development is currently somewhat stalled because the two people who
have been doing the most work (Michael Goffioul and Shai Ayal) are
busy with other things at the moment. So if you (i.e., anyone reading
this, not just Jonathon or Jordi) want things to improve, then I
encourage you to help out. If you just want to wait for someone else
to do the work, or you go off starting some other project that does
not work with what we already have, then I think you may be waiting
for a long time for the core Matlab-compatible graphics in Octave to
improve.
As for dependencies, you need OpenGL and FLTK.