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C.2 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 int ‘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 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))'
  

  or

  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’.
• There is a bug with the makeinfo program that is distributed with Texinfo (through version 3.9) that causes the indices in Octave's on-line manual to be generated incorrectly. If you need to recreate the on-line documentation, you should get the makeinfo program that is distributed with texinfo-3.9 and apply the patch for makeinfo that is distributed with Octave. See the file ‘MAKEINFO.PATCH’ for more details.
• 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 ‘libcruft’ 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 shell_cmd 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 libstdc++.
• 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.
• After installing the binary distribution of Octave in an alternate directory, the Emacs command run-octave doesn't work. Emacs hangs in accept-process-output in inferior-octave-startup. This seems to be a problem with executing a shell script using the comint package. You can avoid the problem by changing the way Octave is installed to eliminate the need for the shell script. You can either compile and install Octave using the source distribution, reinstall the binary distribution in the default directory, or copy the commands in the octave shell script wrapper to your shell startup files (and the shell startup files for anyone else who is using Octave) and then rename the file ‘octave.bin’ to be ‘octave’.