Octave on Inspiron mini: incorrect matrix multiplication and division

[schloegl]

In Octave, the following tests should return NaNs only.

octave:20> version
ans = 3.0.0
octave:21> octave_config_info('BLAS_LIBS')
ans = -llapackgf-3 -lblas-3gf

p = 2;
tmp1 = repmat(nan,p)/repmat(nan,p);
tmp2 = repmat(nan,p)\repmat(nan,p);
tmp3 = repmat(0,p)/repmat(0,p);
tmp4 = repmat(0,p)\repmat(0,p);
tmp5 = repmat(0,p)*repmat(inf,p);
tmp6 = repmat(inf,p)*repmat(0,p);
x = randn(100,1)*ones(1,p); y=x'*x;
tmp7 = y/y;
tmp8 = y\y;
tmp = [tmp1;tmp2;tmp3;tmp4;tmp5;tmp6;tmp7;tmp8];

but on an Inspiron mini 10v, tmp is:
tmp =

   0.00000 0.00000
   0.00000 0.00000
   0.00000 0.00000
   0.00000 0.00000
   0.00000 0.00000
   0.00000 0.00000
   0.00000 0.00000
   0.00000 0.00000
       NaN NaN
       NaN NaN
   0.00000 0.00000
   0.00000 0.00000
   0.50000 0.50000
   0.50000 0.50000
   0.50000 0.50000
   0.50000 0.50000

That means, 7 out of 8 tests fail. I guess, the problem is closely related to the bug reported here:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=419556

There, the problem went away after atlas was installed instead of blas.

When, I tried to install atlas3-base-dev on the Inspiron mini 10, there were a number of libraries removed and atlas added.

$ sudo aptitude install atlas3-base-dev
[sudo] password for as:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Building tag database... Done
The following packages are BROKEN:
  libblas-dev liblapack-dev
The following NEW packages will be automatically installed:
  atlas3-base atlas3-headers cpp-3.4 g77 g77-3.4 gcc-3.4 gcc-3.4-base libg2c0 libg2c0-dev refblas3 refblas3-dev
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  atlas3-base atlas3-base-dev atlas3-headers cpp-3.4 g77 g77-3.4 gcc-3.4 gcc-3.4-base libg2c0 libg2c0-dev refblas3
  refblas3-dev
0 packages upgraded, 12 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/14.9MB of archives. After unpacking 55.8MB will be used.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  liblapack-dev: Conflicts: liblapack-3.so which is a virtual package.
  libblas-dev: Conflicts: libblas-3.so which is a virtual package.
               Conflicts: refblas3-dev but 1.2-8ubuntu2 is to be installed.
Resolving dependencies...
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:

Remove the following packages:
libblas-dev
liblapack-dev
octave3.0-headers

But the above problem did not go away. It seems that the (incorrect) blas functions are still used.

[Paul Larson (pwlars)]

Moved to octave3.0 under Ubuntu

[Mike Miller (mtmiller)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner. There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. It would help us a lot if you could test it on a currently supported Ubuntu version. When you test it and it is still an issue, kindly upload the updated logs by running apport-collect 418847 and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.