Comment 1 for bug 325118

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and confirmed in the Octave Bug mailing list:
http://www-old.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/bug-octave/2009-January.txt

From the mailing list:
"This is a known problem. One workaround is to "clear global" first.
Another workaround is to reinstall octave and during package selection,
do not select ftp, database and ann packages."

It also appears in the Red Hat Bugzilla:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=448467