fatal errors running octave 2.09 under Irix6.2 (in libcruft.so?)

[Jonathan King]

I managed to convince some of the people working at a local
functional MRI center that Octave would be mega-helpful for them,
and since it was less expensive than Matlab (:-)) they took me up on
it, even though I'm not a sysadmin type.

No sweat, I thought.

But this is Irix6.2, so it took me the better part of two days to
get a working gcc2.7.2.2 and libg++ (binaries from
http://reality.sgi.com/ariel/freeware/), a working gmake, a
functional f2c (I think? It compiled correctly anyway...) and a
surprisingly uneventful make of octave, which even runs.  And lots
of things work.  Except if you try something like:

octave:25> a\b
11283:octave: rld: Fatal Error: attempted access to unresolvable symbol in 
/usr/lib/libcruft.so: d_sign

What symbols are unresolvable change with the exact function (e.g.,
it's pow_di when you try "eig" and s_cat for "svd" and "pinv"), but
something is obviously wrong with parts of libcruft.so :-(
Interestingly, though, ffts work fine.  Random numbers work.  "lu"
does not work.  I sort of detect the pattern here, but not the answer.

The only other clue I have is that I had to create symbolic links
from /usr/lib to the .so libraries in /usr/freeware/lib, which
presumably had something to do with a load path variable somewhere.
But I don't see how this accounts for the current misbehavior.  And
all my friends are beginning to think I'm insane at best.

Does anybody have any clues here?

Sorry for the clueless tone of this message, but I see nothing in
the relevant installation or FAQs that give me even a hint, and this
isn't my area of expertise.

jking
address@hidden