can't calculate determinants

[daniel chagas]

Hello,I've built octave 2.9.18 and octave 2.9.19
with atlas libraries and get the same on both:
a=rand(2,2)
det(a)
It gets stucked when trying the last step
it does'nt produce any output- no error message,etc.
it just remains "waiting".
Any idea what can be going on?
daniel