This file documents the installation of Octave. Octave is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. Installing Octave ***************** Here is the procedure for installing Octave from scratch on a Unix system. For instructions on how to install the binary distributions of Octave, see *Note Binary Distributions::. * 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. See the file INSTALL for more information about the command line options used by configure. That file also contains instructions for compiling in a directory other than where the source is located. * Run make. You will need the latest version of GNU make. Modifying Octave's Makefiles to work with other `make' programs is probably not worth your time. We recommend you get and compile GNU make instead. For plotting, you will need to have gnuplot installed on your system. Gnuplot is a command-driven interactive function plotting program. Gnuplot is copyrighted, but freely distributable. The `gnu' in gnuplot is a coincidence--it is not related to the GNU project or the FSF in any but the most peripheral sense. You will probably also need the GNU C and C++ compiler (gcc) and the GNU C++ class library (libg++). GNU make, gcc, and libg++, and gnuplot are all available from many anonymous ftp archives, including ftp.che.utexas.edu, ftp.uu.net, prep.ai.mit.edu, and wuarchive.wustl.edu. If you don't have a Fortran compiler, or if your Fortran compiler doesn't work like the traditional Unix f77, you will need to have the Fortran to C translator f2c. You can get f2c from any number of anonymous ftp archives. The most recent version of f2c is always available from research.att.com. On an otherwise idle SPARCstation II, it will take somewhere between 60 and 90 minutes to compile everything, depending on whether you are compiling the Fortran libraries with f2c or using the Fortran compiler directly. You will need about 25 megabytes of disk storage to work with (considerably less if you don't compile with debugging symbols). To do that, use the command make CFLAGS=-O CXXFLAGS=-O LDFLAGS= instead of just `make'. * If all goes well, run `make install'. This will install a copy of octave, its libraries, and its documentation in the destination directory. As distributed, the octave binary is installed in the directory `/usr/local/bin', other related files are installed in the directory `/usr/local/lib/octave', and the Info file in the directory `/usr/local/lib/info'. You can specify a top-level directory other than `/usr/local' by running configure with the `--prefix=dir' option. See the file INSTALL for more information. * Octave has been compiled and tested with gcc-2.4.2 and libg++-2.3.1 on a SPARCstation 2 running SunOS 4.1.2, an IBM RS/6000 running AIX 3.2, and a DECstation 5000/240 running Ultrix 4.2a. It is probably not very hard to port it to other Unix-like systems that run GCC. Binary Distributions ==================== This section constains instructions for creating a and installing a binary distribution. Installing Octave from a Binary Distribution -------------------------------------------- * To install Octave from a binary distribution, execute the command sh ./doinstall.sh in the top level directory of the distribution. Binary distributions are normally compiled assuming that Octave will be installed in subdirectories of `/usr/local'. If this is not possible, or you would prefer to install it in a different directory, use an optional argument to the doinstall.sh script to specify the top level directory: sh ./doinstall.sh /some/other/directory Octave will then be installed in the following directories: PREFIX/bin -- Octave shell script and binary PREFIX/octave/lib/VERSION -- M-files PREFIX/info -- Info files where PREFIX defaults to `/usr/local', and VERSION stands for the current version number of the interpreter. If these directories don't exist, the script `doinstall.sh' will create them for you. Creating a Binary Distribution ------------------------------ Here is how to build a binary distribution for others. * Build Octave in same directory as source. This is required since the `binary-dist' targets in the Makefiles will not work if you compile outside the source tree. * Use `CFLAGS=-O CXXFLAGS=-O LDFLAGS=' as arguments for Make because most people who get the binary distributions are probably not going to be interested in debugging Octave. * Type `make binary-dist'. This will build everything and then pack it up for distribution.