I just installed SUSE 10.1 because I heard it came with octave, but I couldn't find octave on the YAST software menu. I downloaded the octave 2.1.73 RPM and have been trying to install it, but I've been confronted with a seemingly endless web of dependencies for which I have to manually seek out RPM's, and I'm never completely sure I have the right version of anything. I'm afraid I'm going to sink days into this and in the end, it won't work. Am I doing this right? Isn't there a better way? A single package, perhaps, that contains all the dependencies? Why isn't octave included in my distro? I'll happily install something else if it means I can check a box and get a working octave...

You remined me, so I just installed it under Mandriva. It's not in the Mandriva distribution either, but it is in the collection of contributions (which aren't always as smooth as the distribution RPMs).

I don't use Yast, but I believe you can use it to install an RPM that you've downloaded, just as I did with Mandriva's urpmi tool. The advantage is that it will sort out dependencies and if any are available in the distro, it should prompt for the CD or download. I don't know the syntax.

There was one problem I encountered under Mandriva. The octave-forge RPM complained that the liblapack.so.3 dependency failed, even though I had just installed liblapack3.0. The problem is that while it supplies /usr/lib/liblapack.so.3.0, the RPM maintainer failed to make a symbolic link, liblapack.so.3.

I manually made the symbolic link. It's not in the RPM database, so the link isn't recognized, but when that's the last remaining dependency I'll just override it with '--nodeps'. I've had to do that before.