Unable to install Octave

Solution 1:

This is no universal answer. The problem was complex and was dissolved by a longer analysis in the chat.

Here is a summary from the chat.

sudo apt-get install libosmesa6
sudo apt-get install libglapi-mesa

It removed a lot of packages, eg ubuntu-desktop

sudo apt-get install -f
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

From here, we used aptitude, a better problem resolver

sudo aptitude install libgl1-mesa-dri

Now a lot of packages was removed, but ubuntu-desktop is installed.

sudo aptitude install unity8
sudo aptitude install octave

Done

Solution 2:

The following worked for me at the end on a Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit machine.

In terminal, install:

sudo apt-get build-dep octave
sudo apt-get install libqt4-opengl-dev

Then download and build Octave from source:

wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/octave/octave-4.0.0.tar.xz
tar -xaf octave-4.0.0.tar.xz
cd octave-4.0.0
./configure
make
sudo make install

This worked on all the machines I tried in my laboratory.