Installing a bleeding-edge Octave next to a stable Octave

[John W. Eaton]

On 27-Mar-2007, Steve C. Thompson wrote:

| Now that I've learned about some things about Octave's MEX
| capability from
| http://www.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/help-octave/2007-March/003473.html
| , I need to think about installing the latest Octave.  As the
| previous post states, 2.9.10.  I'm running 2.1.73 in Ubuntu,
| which is given to me simply with `apt-get install octave' .  I'm
| wondering:
| 
|   1. how best to install 2.9.10 and if I can keep 2.1.73 intact;
|   2. if 1. happens, can I run the two different versions at will,
|      in parallel (for example, I'm currently running simulations
|      in 2.1.73, and I'd like to, at the same time, play around
|      with 2.9.10 for the MEX work); and
|   3. what the chances are I'm about to completely mess up my
|      system!
| 
| Also, from http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/download.html, link
| `Developmental', which sends you to
| ftp://ftp.octave.org/pub/octave/bleeding-edge , I'm not seeing
| 2.9.10.  Does this mean 2.9.10 must be installed by way of the
| anonymous CVS option?
| 
| Any help one these topics will be much appreciated!

If you are installing from source and don't want to interfere with an
installation from a package system, then I recommend configuring with
something like --prefix=/usr/local/octave/2.9.10.  That way,
everything is installed in subdirectories of /usr/local/octave/2.9.10.
To use the new version, add /usr/local/octave/2.9.10/bin to your PATH.
To delete it, rm -rf /usr/local/octave/2.9.10.

jwe