Building Gnuplot

Essentially all you need is a version of the Gnuplot data plotting program which can produce GIF output.  The most recent production release of Gnuplot is 3.5, and is available in  ftp://ftp.dartmouth.edu/pub/gnuplot/ .  Gnuplot does not include GIF support directly -- it usually writes to the rarely used .ppm format.  This version supposedly can also be patched to support GIF output, but it seems to be easier to accomplish this with the 3.6 beta distribution.

The official way to do this would be to follow the directions from the Gnuplot FAQ or newsgroup, by downloading the most recent version and following the directions inside it that say how to add the GIF support.  However, for your convenience, here are some step-by-step directions on how this can be done.  Note that none of what follows is from the Gnuplot group.  If these directions don't work for you, you should do it the official way by doing what the Gnuplot directions say.

  1. Get Gnuplot 3.6 beta 340 from   ftp://cmpc1.phys.soton.ac.uk/pub/gnuplot-beta340.tar.gz .
  2. Gnuplot requires a supplementary library, the GD library, which produces GIF output. It cannot be bundled directly with Gnuplot, but you can get it from  http://www.boutell.com/gd/gd1.2.tar.Z .
  3. Create a working directory, for example /usr/local/src/gnuplot.  Move the gnuplot-beta340.tar.gz file and the the gd1.2.tar.Z file into this directory.
  4. Extract gnuplot-beta340.tar.gz, for example "gzip -d -c gnuplot-beta340.tar.gz | tar xf -".  Similarly, extract gd1.2.tar.Z, like "compress -d -c gd1.2.tar.Z".
  5. Rename the gd1.2 directory to just gd, like "mv gd1.2 gd".  Don't forget this step!
  6. Download this small gd patch, and copy it to your working directory.".
  7. Download this gnuplot3.6b340 patch, and copy it to your working directory. (Unfortunately this file turns out to be somewhat large, since I re-generated the configure script using a newer version of autoconf -- but there are actually only a few trivial changes.)
  8. Apply the patches:  "patch -c gd-patch.txt" and "patch -c gnuplot-patch.txt".
  9. Change to the gnuplot directory, then "./configure" and "make". The configure script has been patched to look for your "gd" directory and use it.  Note that the NcFTPd Reports Package cannot use the regular gnuplot, so if it does not find gd, you'll end up with a regular version of gnuplot which cannot output .gif files.
  10. You may then try "make install", or just copy the "gnuplot" program to your install directory.