slackbuilds/academic/octave/README

GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical
computations.  It provides a convenient command line interface for
solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing
other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible
with Matlab.  It may also be used as a batch-oriented language.

This requires a BLAS/LAPACK implementation. Choose one of these package
sets:

 * OpenBLAS (includes both a BLAS and a LAPACK implementation)
 * atlas (includes both a BLAS and a LAPACK implementation)
 * blas, lapack (the Netlib reference implementations)

If more than one set is installed (assuming there are no packaging
conflicts) then the auto-detection will use the first implementation
from this list that it finds.  If in doubt, choose the Netlib
reference implementations; other packages that require a BLAS or
LAPACK implementation may not build if they are not configured to
detect/use alternate implementations.

These optional dependencies will be used if found (see INSTALL.OCTAVE,
in the Octave source, for a description of what each dependency
offers): amd, camd, colamd, ccolamd, cholmod, umfpack, cxsparse, glpk,
arpack-ng, qrupdate, sundials, qhull, hdf5, fltk, ftgl, gl2ps, jdk,
GraphicsMagick, portaudio.

Octave can use ImageMagick (part of Slackware) or GraphicsMagick
(available from SBo) for image-reading functionality.  If both
are installed, GraphicsMagick will be selected by default,
since ImageMagick is not well-supported by the Octave developers.
If you have problems with ImageMagick, try rebuilding Octave with
GraphicsMagick, or pass MAGICK="" to the script.

If you have arpack installed and the configure script segfaults when
trying to detect arpack, try switching to arpack-ng (which is partly
maintained by Octave developers).