Update: The science package for openSUSE contains a recent and working Octave package, see this blog post. It is not necessary to compile your own package.
There is no adequate octave package for openSUSE with SuiteSparse support, therefore one has to compile it manually.
The following steps will install all dependencies for Octave 3.2.4, then compile octave, create a rpm package and install it on openSUSE 11.3.
