Re: [Plplot-general] PLPLOT installation...

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On Mon, 16 Sep 2002, Ron Ghosh wrote:

> I'm an old dinosaur who has decided to take the plunge and
> abandon expectk Fortran and PGPLOT after nearly a decade for the
> luscious new potential offered by Python and PLPLOT.

Us old fortran dinosaurs (;-)) have to stick together so I will try to help
you as much as possible.

> 1. Documentation
>    The pdf file printed here has some curious font
>    problems.

The pdf form of the documentation is still experimental because we are relying
on experimental docbook tools to create it.  The html and postscript forms
should be fine.

>    The PostScript file plplotdoc-0.4.3.ps.gz
>    is not actually a gzip file, it is straight PS
>    and prints correctly on the same printer (HP4100)

Your printer may be smart enough to decompress it on the fly.  I just
checked the plplot-5.1.0 tarball at
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2915 as well as the
website at http://plplot.sourceforge.net/resources/docbook-manual/, and
plplotdoc-0.4.3.ps.gz is compressed in both cases to 260K or so.  The
uncompressed form is over a Megabyte.

>
> 2. RedHat 7.2
>    I had loaded Python2-2.2.1 (src-rpm) and your configure script
>    in the 5.1.0 looks only for python2.1 files, so I
>    hand-edited these.
>
>    During the build there were problems in finding
>    python_dynamic/Makefile.pre.in because of the failed
>    link to /usr/lib/python2/config/Makefile.pre.in
>
>    Although I tried python 2.1 I finally backtracked
>    to python 1.6 and found a Misc/Makefile.pre.in
>    which I copied to python_dynamic which enabled me
>    to complete the build.

To figure out what to do for RH 7.2, I would have a look at the RH7.2 src
rpm (especially the spec file) for plplot-5.1.0 at
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2915.  (Of course, you
could also just use the binary rpm directly.)

>
>    The font files did not appear to be buildable with
>    make fonts, and I more or less hand built these;
>    it was also necessary to specify the libplplot.so
>    in the gcc command - although I had done a make install.

We distribute the font files as part of the distribution, and I suggest you
use them as is without trying to rebuild them.  It's been literally years
since any of us have looked at rebuilding the font files so undoubtedly
bit-rot has set in.  That said, any of our users should be able to rebuild
them if they want so I will put this on my ToDo list to figure out what the
trouble is.

>
> 3. Finally I have been looking for environment variables
>    for the font files, directories etc.  Although I have
>    set PLPLOT_HOME to /usr/local the font files are not found
>    and the test programs fail.

I tested a local install of PLplot-5.1.0 thoroughly (prefix =
/usr/local/plplot), and it worked fine without requiring any environment
variables to be set (other than to put /usr/local/plplot/bin on my path).
Your problem may have to do with the rebuilt fonts.  I suggest you clean out
your current installed version, clean out your build location, and start all
over from the tarball without any PLplot0-specific environment variables
being set or fonts rebuilt.  Then follow exactly what is done in the RH7.2
spec file (including setting all the environment variables having to do with
python).  The one exception to this is your prefix should be different
(/usr/local or /usr/local/plplot should work) since it is not a good idea to
install a tarball directly into /usr/bin, /usr/lib, and so forth.

>
> 4. My next challenge is SGI-IRIX, then alas Windows!

For any variant of Unix such as IRIX be sure an install and use the Gnu
version of Make since the PLplot build depends on it.  I won't be able to
help you with the windows build and install (no windows experience), but
other PLplot developers on this list have made it work for them so they
should be able to help you out.

Alan

email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902	FAX: 250-721-7715
snail-mail:
Dr. Alan W. Irwin
Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3055,
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, V8W 3P6
__________________________

Linux-powered astrophysics
__________________________