Finally, the science repository for openSUSE comes with a recent Octave version that supports UMFPACK. Add the corresponding repository
sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/science/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/ opensuse:science
and install the package
sudo zypper in octave
You verify that UMFPACK works by the following computation
A=sprandsym(1000,0.01)+eye(1000);b=rand(1000,1);norm(A*(A\b)-b)
which solves a linear system with a sparse symmetric positive definite system matrix A and prints the residual to the console.
