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 either Qt4 or Qt5, and it will select Qt5 if both are
installed.  You can force it to use a particular version by passing QT=4 or
QT=5 to the script.  If Qt5 is selected and it does not find a Qt5 version of
QScintilla, then the editor window in the GUI will be disabled.  If you need
the editor window and have both Qt versions installed, force it to use Qt4.

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).