Re: installation problem with f2c

[Quentin Spencer]

Ares wrote:

> hi all,
> I'm new to Octave (actually I'm new to Linux and programming in 
> general). I'm trying to install Octave on my Linux installation (FC4) 
> on my laptop (IP4 with 512MB RAM) and considering moving my 
> application from the sooooo expensive Matlab to Octave.
>
> I made ./configure to install Octave and I got the famous message: 
> "you need a f2c compiler installed and on your path". I went on 
> http://www.netlib.org/f2c/, downloaded the bundle libf2c and 
> successfully made "make" in the temp directory. Of course, this was 
> not enough! I get  the error message again and again...
>
> Is there someone who can help me? by the way I don't see why they 
> don't distribute f2c in the Octave installation package, it's free SW 
> so wouldn't it suffice to cite it in the Licence? I hope to get the 
> meaning of it all...


The f2c library is included with the g77 FORTRAN compiler, but not with 
the newer gfortran compiler, which is the default compiler with gcc 4.0 
(the version of gcc included with FC4). You're probably seeing this 
error because you don't have gcc-gfortran installed. Having said that, 
unless you're trying to compile the CVS version, I don't think there's 
any reason to compile octave yourself when it's already available in 
Fedora Extras. It can be installed using the yum command. I would 
recommend also installing atlas and octave-forge, all of which can be 
done with the command "yum install octave-forge atlas-sse2". This will 
install octave 2.1.73. If you're interested in 2.9.5, that may be coming 
soon as well, as I've been asked (I'm the packager) to upgrade the FC4 
version of octave to 2.9.x.

Quentin