Prerequisite software for Octave - fltk 1/2?

[John W. Eaton]

On 19-Jan-2010, John Murdie wrote:

| 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

Maybe it would be better to add the list to the Octave manual instead?

| 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.

What system are you using?  If it is Debian based, then installing
prerequisites for building Octave can be done with

  apt-get build-dep octave3.2

This should get everything needed to build Octave 3.2, but will not
get new dependencies required for building Octave from the Mercurial
archive (obviously, the 3.2 package can't know about future
requirements).

I think something similar is possible for RPM-based systems, but I'm
don't know the details.

jwe