Building Octave Statically (and without graphics)

[Tim Currie]

Hi!
  I'm trying to build a static Octave binary on Fedora 9. In building 
all the deps as static libs, I ran into trouble with the requirement for 
libGL. It seems (according to comments in the Mesa configure script) 
that Mesa cannot be built statically, as the DRI requires that the 
drivers be dynamic, which seems to conflict with the explicit assertion 
in the documentation that Octave can, in fact, be built as a static 
binary on Linux.
  This might be beside the point if I can figure out how to build Octave 
*without any graphical capability*, as the Octave configure script 
suggests is possible, because this build is going to be run on a large 
cluster. But alas, this doesn't work any better than building Mesa, 
which is to say that following the instructions in the README, as well 
as the comments in the configure script and the Makefile, doesn't 
produce the predicted results.
  Any suggestions you can offer or resources you can point me at would 
be very much appreciated.

Thanks,

-Tim Currie