Re: installing octave on Linux-Ubuntu

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 13/02/2008, Giovanna Guidoboni <address@hidden> wrote:
> my name is Giovanna Guidoboni and I am an Assistant professor at the
> University of Houston. I am trying to install octave 3.0.0 on my Linux
> machine, but when I am running ./configure it fails because it is not able
> to find the path of GNU readline (which is available in /usr/local/lib).

Ubuntu should be able to build things the Debian way. In particular,
you shouldn't be installing anything under /usr/local/lib (at least,
not something as basic as readline).

You might want to do a Debian sid backport into Ubuntu, since Octave
3.0 is already packaged for Debian sid (and it should be packaged for
Ubuntu too for the next release).

I explained in another message how to build things the Debian way:

     http://www.nabble.com/Help-a-beginner-please-td14980253.html

(last message in that thread, the paragraph that begins with "the etch
backport..." You may mentally replace all instances of "etch" with
"Ubuntu".)

Although it's generally not recommended to mix Debian and Ubuntu
binary packages, in this instance all you are mixing is some Debian
sources and building them inside Ubuntu, so all should be fine. Make
sure you don't add any deb lines in your /etc/apt/sources.list for
Debian, only add deb-src lines. The former are for binaries, which you
don't want; you only want sources.

HTH,
- Jordi G. H.