(octave.info)Installation Problems

E.4 Installation Problems
=========================

This section contains a list of problems (and some apparent problems
that don’t really mean anything is wrong) that may show up during
installation of Octave.

• On some SCO systems, ‘info’ fails to compile if ‘HAVE_TERMIOS_H’ is
defined in ‘config.h’. Simply removing the definition from
‘info/config.h’ should allow it to compile.

• If ‘configure’ finds ‘dlopen’, ‘dlsym’, ‘dlclose’, and ‘dlerror’,
but not the header file ‘dlfcn.h’, you need to find the source for
the header file and install it in the directory ‘usr/include’.
This is reportedly a problem with Slackware 3.1. For Linux/GNU
systems, the source for ‘dlfcn.h’ is in the ‘ldso’ package.

• Building ‘.oct’ files doesn’t work.

You should probably have a shared version of ‘libstdc++’. A patch
is needed to build shared versions of version 2.7.2 of ‘libstdc++’
on the HP-PA architecture. You can find the patch at
<ftp://ftp.cygnus.com/pub/g++/libg++-2.7.2-hppa-gcc-fix>.

• On some DEC alpha systems there may be a problem with the ‘libdxml’
library, resulting in floating point errors and/or segmentation
faults in the linear algebra routines called by Octave. If you
encounter such problems, then you should modify the configure
script so that ‘SPECIAL_MATH_LIB’ is not set to ‘-ldxml’.

• On FreeBSD systems Octave may hang while initializing some internal
constants. The fix appears to be to use

options GPL_MATH_EMULATE

rather than

options MATH_EMULATE

in the kernel configuration files (typically found in the directory
‘/sys/i386/conf’). After making this change, you’ll need to
rebuild the kernel, install it, and reboot.

• If you encounter errors like

passing `void (*)()' as argument 2 of
`octave_set_signal_handler(int, void (*)(int))'

warning: ANSI C++ prohibits conversion from `(int)'
to `(...)'

while compiling ‘sighandlers.cc’, you may need to edit some files
in the ‘gcc’ include subdirectory to add proper prototypes for
functions there. For example, Ultrix 4.2 needs proper declarations
for the ‘signal’ function and the ‘SIG_IGN’ macro in the file
‘signal.h’.

On some systems the ‘SIG_IGN’ macro is defined to be something like
this:

#define SIG_IGN (void (*)())1

when it should really be something like:

#define SIG_IGN (void (*)(int))1

to match the prototype declaration for the ‘signal’ function. This
change should also be made for the ‘SIG_DFL’ and ‘SIG_ERR’ symbols.
It may be necessary to change the definitions in ‘sys/signal.h’ as
well.

The ‘gcc’ ‘fixincludes’ and ‘fixproto’ scripts should probably fix
these problems when ‘gcc’ installs its modified set of header
files, but I don’t think that’s been done yet.

*You should not change the files in ‘/usr/include’*. You can find
the ‘gcc’ include directory tree by running the command

gcc -print-libgcc-file-name

The directory of ‘gcc’ include files normally begins in the same
directory that contains the file ‘libgcc.a’.

• Some of the Fortran subroutines may fail to compile with older
versions of the Sun Fortran compiler. If you get errors like

zgemm.f:
zgemm:
warning: unexpected parent of complex expression subtree
zgemm.f, line 245: warning: unexpected parent of complex
expression subtree
warning: unexpected parent of complex expression subtree
zgemm.f, line 304: warning: unexpected parent of complex
expression subtree
warning: unexpected parent of complex expression subtree
zgemm.f, line 327: warning: unexpected parent of complex
expression subtree
pcc_binval: missing IR_CONV in complex op
make[2]: *** [zgemm.o] Error 1

when compiling the Fortran subroutines in the ‘liboctave/external’
subdirectory, you should either upgrade your compiler or try
compiling with optimization turned off.

• On NeXT systems, if you get errors like this:

/usr/tmp/cc007458.s:unknown:Undefined local
symbol LBB7656
/usr/tmp/cc007458.s:unknown:Undefined local
symbol LBE7656

when compiling ‘Array.cc’ and ‘Matrix.cc’, try recompiling these
files without ‘-g’.

• Some people have reported that calls to system() and the pager do
not work on SunOS systems. This is apparently due to having
‘G_HAVE_SYS_WAIT’ defined to be 0 instead of 1 when compiling
‘libg++’.

• On systems where the reference BLAS library is used the following
matrix-by-vector multiplication incorrectly handles NaN values of
the form ‘NaN * 0’.

[NaN, 1; 0, 0] * [0; 1]
⇒
[ 1
0 ]

correct result ⇒
[ NaN
0 ]

Install a different BLAS library such as OpenBLAS or ATLAS to
correct this issue.

• On NeXT systems, linking to ‘libsys_s.a’ may fail to resolve the
following functions

_tcgetattr
_tcsetattr
_tcflow

which are part of ‘libposix.a’. Unfortunately, linking Octave with
‘-posix’ results in the following undefined symbols.

.destructors_used
.constructors_used
_objc_msgSend
_NXGetDefaultValue
_NXRegisterDefaults
.objc_class_name_NXStringTable
.objc_class_name_NXBundle

One kluge around this problem is to extract ‘termios.o’ from
‘libposix.a’, put it in Octave’s ‘src’ directory, and add it to the
list of files to link together in the makefile. Suggestions for
better ways to solve this problem are welcome!

• If Octave crashes immediately with a floating point exception, it
is likely that it is failing to initialize the IEEE floating point
values for infinity and NaN.

If your system actually does support IEEE arithmetic, you should be
able to fix this problem by modifying the function
‘octave_ieee_init’ in the file ‘lo-ieee.cc’ to correctly initialize
Octave’s internal infinity and NaN variables.

If your system does not support IEEE arithmetic but Octave’s
configure script incorrectly determined that it does, you can work
around the problem by editing the file ‘config.h’ to not define
‘HAVE_ISINF’, ‘HAVE_FINITE’, and ‘HAVE_ISNAN’.

In any case, please report this as a bug since it might be possible
to modify Octave’s configuration script to automatically determine
the proper thing to do.

• If Octave is unable to find a header file because it is installed
in a location that is not normally searched by the compiler, you
can add the directory to the include search path by specifying (for
example) ‘CPPFLAGS=-I/some/nonstandard/directory’ as an argument to
‘configure’. Other variables that can be specified this way are
‘CFLAGS’, ‘CXXFLAGS’, ‘FFLAGS’, and ‘LDFLAGS’. Passing them as
options to the configure script also records them in the
‘config.status’ file. By default, ‘CPPFLAGS’ and ‘LDFLAGS’ are
empty, ‘CFLAGS’ and ‘CXXFLAGS’ are set to "-g -O2" and ‘FFLAGS’ is
set to "-O".

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