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.

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, qhull, hdf5, fltk, ftgl, gl2ps, jdk, GraphicsMagick.

Octave can use ImageMagick (part of Slackware) or GraphicsMagick (available
from SBo) for some functionality.  ImageMagick 6.8.6-10 from Slackware 14.1
appears to be incompatible (build failure).  Octave searches for
GraphicsMagick by default, and previous versions of this script changed the
default to ImageMagick to avoid the need for yet another dependency.  If you
need this functionality, or if Octave decides to compile against ImageMagick
for some reason, try installing GraphicsMagick.

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).