Building Octave 3.8.2 on CentOS 6.6

I recently ran into some trouble building Octave on CentOS.  After some searching of different message boards that offered steps towards resolution that didn't solve the problem for me, I came across this post which pointed me in the right direction.

I downloaded the BLAS source from here (click the "blas.tgz" link under the section "Reference BLAS Verstion 3.5.0"), and built it using the instructions given on the post linked above

gfortran -shared -O2 *.f -o libblas.so -fPIC

As suggested by that post, pointing the configure script to the lapack build at /usr/lib64/liblapack.so.3 didn't work. Instead, it required to download the "atlas" package from the yum repos, and point the configure script to the lapack library provided with it.

A couple of additional steps were required to resolve some problems with the configure script. Namely, I had to install the readline-devel package and the qt-devel package (to allow building of the gui). The command for configuration finally was

./configure --with-blas=/home/user123/BLAS/libblas.so --with-lapack=/usr/lib64/atlas/liblapack.so.3