Trouble with Qt libraries while installing Gnu Octave 4.0.0 from source

Question

I know that similar problems to this have arisen. I have tried all of the debugging techniques that I have heard of. I have made sure to download all of the dependencies for Qt4 from the following source http://wiki.octave.org/Octave_for_Debian_systems. I have tried locating the QtGui cflags and libraries with pkg-config and manually adding those onto the ./configure command. I have even tried adding the qt cflags/libs to the makefile. At the moment, I am configuring with:

./configure --enable-shared --disable-static --enable-jit --prefix=/opt/octave4.0

and the tail of my output is:

  Qt CPPFLAGS:                 
  Qt LDFLAGS:                  
  Qt libraries:                
  READLINE libraries:          -lreadline
  Sndfile CPPFLAGS:             
  Sndfile LDFLAGS:              
  Sndfile libraries:           -lsndfile  
  TERM libraries:              -lncurses
  UMFPACK CPPFLAGS:            
  UMFPACK LDFLAGS:             
  UMFPACK libraries:           -lumfpack
  X11 include flags:           
  X11 libraries:               -lX11
  Z CPPFLAGS:                  
  Z LDFLAGS:                   
  Z libraries:                 -lz

  Default pager:               less
  gnuplot:                     gnuplot

  Build Octave GUI:                   no
  JIT compiler for loops:             yes
  Build Java interface:               yes
  Do internal array bounds checking:  no
  Build static libraries:             no
  Build shared libraries:             yes
  Dynamic Linking:                    yes (dlopen)
  Include support for GNU readline:   yes
  64-bit array dims and indexing:     no
  OpenMP SMP multithreading:          yes
  Build cross tools:                  no

configure: WARNING: Qt libraries not found -- disabling GUI
configure: 
configure: NOTE: Libraries or auxiliary programs may be skipped if they are
configure: NOTE: not found OR if they are missing required features on your
configure: NOTE: system. 

I'm officially stuck...

Answer 1

What isn't obvious (or installed with the INSTALL.OCTAVE suggested apt-get builddep octave) is that Octave wants qt4, I tried first by installing qt5 dev packages.

What I did that made it work was:

sudo apt-get install libqt4-opengl-dev libqt4-private-dev libqt4pas-dev

but reading the page you linked to makes me believe you need just (and this includes the packages I already had installed:

sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev libqtcore4 libqtwebkit4 libqt4-network libqtgui4 libqt4-opengl-dev

After that the ./configure worked nicely and detected qt.

The great big, support everything, command listed at the bottom appears to do the right thing for installing dependencies as well:

sudo apt-get install gcc g++ gfortran make libblas-dev liblapack-dev libpcre3-dev libarpack2-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev epstool libfftw3-dev transfig libfltk1.3-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfreetype6-dev libgl2ps-dev libglpk-dev libreadline-dev gnuplot-x11 libgraphicsmagick++1-dev libhdf5-serial-dev openjdk-8-jdk libsndfile1-dev llvm-dev lpr texinfo libgl1-mesa-dev libosmesa6-dev pstoedit portaudio19-dev libqhull-dev libqrupdate-dev libqscintilla2-dev libqt4-dev libqtcore4 libqtwebkit4 libqt4-network libqtgui4 libqt4-opengl-dev libsuitesparse-dev texlive libxft-dev zlib1g-dev autoconf automake bison flex gperf gzip icoutils librsvg2-bin libtool perl rsync tar

But that might easily install a lot more dependencies that you really need.

Answer 2

I'm not sure which version made it work (Qt4 or Qt5) but try installing the packages returned by the output of this command:

apt-cache search libqt5 | grep -e 'network' -e 'core' -e 'gui' -e 'opengl'

On my machine, this gives:

libqt5core5a - Qt 5 core module
libqt5gui5 - Qt 5 GUI module
libqt5network5 - Qt 5 network module
libqt5opengl5 - Qt 5 OpenGL module
libqt5opengl5-dev - Qt 5 OpenGL library development files

You can try a similar thing replacing qt5 with qt4 in the above command.

The opengl package is not mentioned in INSTALL.OCTAVE, I found it by looking through the configuration script, at the line

QT_MODULES="QtCore QtGui QtNetwork QtOpenGL"

This is what made it work for me.