Prerequisite software for Octave - fltk 1/2?

[John Murdie]

It would be good to see the Octave FAQ section 7.1 filled out with a
table of all the prerequisite software that is required for each
particular desired 'extra' functionality - e.g. Fulltick (FLTK) for
native graphics, the BLAS libraries, the FFTW libraries etc - almost all
things I don't recognise - having a column saying what functionality
that adds, and a column of links to instructions for obtaining, or
building, those things on the systems for which Octave is available. At
the minute, the section simply says:

> 7.1 What else do I need?
> To compile Octave, you will need a recent version of GNU Make. You
> will also need GCC 3.3 or later, although GCC 4.1 or later is
> recommended. 
> 
> You must have GNU Make to compile octave. Octave's Makefiles use
> features of GNU Make that are not present in other versions of make.
> GNU Make is very portable and easy to install.

I'd write something myself, except that I don't know Octave makes use of
the external software. (Discovering what each is would perhaps be an
easier job.)

I thought of this matter while considering whether I needed FLTK 1 or 2
- the Linux system I am using provides both. I think I'm right in saying
that, at the minute, Octave is still on FLTK 1 - FLTK 2 seems to be in
an earlyish stage of development and the Octave configure script makes
use of the fltk-config command and not the fltk2-config command.

John A. Murdie