seeing the difficulties the potential GSOD student has mentioned, plus other conversations about difficulties on Mac, Windows, etc., a virtualbox or equivalent image has been suggested several times.
What would a minimal virtual box image prepared to clone/setup an Octave development environment look like? would it be of a reasonable size to include on the download server alongside the binary installers? I know a fully setup virtual image can be big, and there are limits to reasonable server storage space. But what about something with the just OS set up and a set of scripts to set up the cloned source and whatever build dependencies are needed? Maybe some of those dependencies could be preinstalled in the image if they aren't too hefty?
Or at that point would it be more trouble than it's worth? But maybe that's too much handholding? Easier to just make a wiki instruction set for 'download vb' 'setup linux vm' 'follow linux build instructions', especially if you're targeting a potential developer? (I guess such a VM would be useful for those trying to run the latest & greatest version of Octave too.)