Matrix inverses are illegal on K6-2 ?

[Tom Williams]

Hi, I've installed Octave 2.1.72 on Xubuntu. The laptop it's on is an old HP 
with 128 Mb ram and 550 MHz K6-2 processor.

Simple matrix operations like trace and transpose will work, but the 
determinant or inverse of even a 2x2 matrix results in:

panic: Illegal instruction -- stopping myself...
attempting to save variables to 'octave-core'...
save to 'octave-core' complete

and then, an exit!

I'm just wondering if this is a processor issue, or if there is some way I 
can fix this.

Thanks