octave and 'fixed' package: some issues

[Dario Cardini]

Hi,
I
 used octave 3.2.3 + fixed as it came in ubuntu distribution about one 
year ago. It worked very fine and I succesfully did some modeling.

1)
Now I had to upgrade ubuntu to the last version (11.04).
It
 is still possible to install octave and the fixed package from synaptic
 but when you call fixed from octave, you get this error:

fi_y = fixed(6,0,y) 

error: `fixed' undefined near line 8 column 8

It is not clear
 to me what this means, because the fixed package is loaded and this 
command worked perfectly with the 3.2.3 version of octave.

Do you know if I am making any mistake ?

2) 
I tried to install manually octave 3.2.3 from the tar file in a local directory.

I got this error while doing the make check:

........
 scripts/geometry/rectint.m ............................. PASS    9/9   

  scripts/geometry/tsearchn.m ............................ PASS    5/5   
  scripts/help/doc.m ..................................... PASS    1/1   
  scripts/image/contrast.m ............................... PASS    1/1   

  scripts/image/imread.m .................................octave: magick/semaphore.c:525: LockSemaphoreInfo: Assertion `semaphore_info != (SemaphoreInfo *) ((void *)0)' failed.
panic: Aborted -- stopping myself...

make[2]: *** [check] Aborted
make[2]: Leaving directory `/tools/octave/octave-3.2.3/test'
make[1]: *** [check] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/tools/octave/octave-3.2.3'
make: *** [check] Error 2

Do you know what is the cause of this ?
Attached I send you the log files of make check and of make.

3)
 Final question: does it still make sense to work with the fixed package
 ? To my understanding it will not be ported to 3.4.* versions of 
octave.

Thank you,
Kind Regards
Dario