[Plplot-general] Some installation problems

[Victor M. <vm...@ma...>]

 I posted this message to Maurice LeBrun originally, and he suggested me
to send it to a Plplot mailing list instead. Here it is, in case someone
knows how to fix this in future releases (something seemed to happen when 
configuring the Makefile, there may be a problem with some script), if
necessary. Regards,

						Victor

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 16:01:08 -0300 (CLST)
From: Victor Munoz <vm...@ma...>
To: Dr. Maurice LeBrun <mj...@di...>
Subject: PLplot new user


  Hello, I just wanted to drop you a (not so short) note about PLplot,
which I've been just begun using this week. It's a really nice library and
I hope it will help solve my problems, but I wanted to tell you a few
things about some difficulties installing it. If you have the patience to
read this or want to forward it to someone who might know better about
these details it would be fine.

  Specifically, I think I faced some unexpected problems with the
configuration step, since some options I asked in the command line
disappeared from the final Makefile. This prevented me from compiling the
C demos as I explain below.
  And second, when the previous problem was solved, I spent some time
trying to compile my own test C++ code, since the executable file could
not find the shared objects. Maybe I missed some part of the
documentation, I don't know, but it would be nice if a better
documentation about this final step would be available.

  Above all, thanks for this wonderful software. Now the details:


  I'm working with a Debian potato Linux distribution, and instead of
dowloading the distribution's release 4.99j, which a friend of mine
(who's much more expert than me in Linux) told me had compilation
problems. Anyway, he gave me the 5.0.4 tar file, which worked for him
without much difficulty. I followed the installation steps (configure,
make, make install), and when I tried to compile the demos (make x01c, for
instance), I had no xwin terminal listed, though I could save the output
as postscript, for instance. The command line I gave to configure was

configure --with-double --enable-xwin --enable-octave --enable-gnome

However, as I said, the config summary stated "enable_xwin:  no",
"enable_octave:  no" and "enable_gnome: no".

I tried deleting installed files and starting again, or
copying the already configured files which worked so fine for my friend,
but it did not work. Eventually, my friend told me not to try
--enable-octave and --enable-gnome, because he had the same problem I had,
that somehow the "yes" turned out to be a "no". He also suggested to
install the Debian distribution's plplot version to have octave support,
because this did work well, and I did.

We don't know what happened with all these trials, but the fact is that
the next time I untared the 5.0.4 files to try again, and I typed

 configure --with-double 

xwin appeared among the enabled options in the config summary! This was
not the only weird thing, because the prefix had been changed to /usr,
instead of /usr/local/plplot. All my previous trials had the
/usr/local/plplot prefix, so I don't know. My friend's configured version
(which I also tried to install as I said) had the /usr prefix, but I
couldn't guess why this could affect later installations (I logged out in
case some environment variable was somehow set, but the prefix still was
/usr). So I ended up saying

 configure --with-double --prefix=/usr/local/plplot 

and everything worked fine. 
  At least with compiling and viewing the demos in my screen, because I
had to spent some hours to have a personal example work, until I found the
correct combination of compiler options which works.  I finally used the
following Makefile to compile and link a prueba.cpp C++ program:

prueba.o: prueba.cpp
	g++ -c -O -I. -I/usr/local/plplot/include prueba.cpp

prueba: prueba.o
	g++ -Wall -L/usr/X11R6/lib  prueba.o -lplcxxd -lplplotd -o prueba
-lX11 -ldl -lm -lg++ -Wl,-rpath -Wl,/usr/local/plplot/lib

 The last option -Wl,/usr/local/plplot/lib was unavoidable if I wanted the
executable file prueba to find the libplplotd.so.5 file (without it, the
program compiled and linked, but could not execute because it didn't file
this shared object). This was unexpected, because my friend did not need
such line to compile his programs, which is partly why it took so long for
me to realize how to make it. 
 
  That's about all I think.  Thanks for your patience, and regards,

					Victor Munoz
					Dept. of Physics
					U. of Chile