Install gnuplot on Ubuntu

Copied from Miscellaneous Debris

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Though there is gnuplot available in the Ubuntu/Debian repositories, there are reasons to compile gnuplot - first and most important gnu readline support! I don’t know why Debian maintainers don’t compile the GNU readline support into GNUplot - it’s some license issues - but it’s like that and this makes gnuplot practically unusable. Second having the pdf and wxWidgets terminal is not that bad at all

So here are the instructions:

First we compile and install wxWidgets

• Download wxWidgets GTK 2.8.3
• Untar it somewhere: tar xzf wxGTK-2.8.3.tar.gz
• cd cd wxGTK-2.8.3/
• mkdir buildgtk
• cd buildgtk
• ../configure
• make
• sudo paco -lp wxGTK-2.8.3 make install (or just make install if you don’t use paco)
• sudo ldconfig (you may need to add /usr/local/lib to the file /etc/ld.so.conf before)

Than we are going to install the PDFlib lite

• Download PDFlib Lite
• tar xzf PDFlib-Lite-7.0.1.tar.gz
• cd PDFlib-Lite-7.0.1
• ./configure
• make
• sudo paco -lD make install
• sudo ldconfig

Than we compile gnuplot

• Download gnuplot 4.2
• tar xzf gnuplot-4.2.0.tar.gz
• cd gnuplot-4.2.0
• ./configure –with-readline=gnu (check if we have the lines “pdf terminal: yes” and “wxt terminal: yes (EXPERIMENTAL)”, if you miss the jpeg, png and gif terminal install the libgd2-xpm-dev package; also check if you find “Readline library: GNU readline library with -lncurses”, if it says only minimal readline support than install the libreadline5-dev package; you need also the libx11-dev and libxt-dev package for the X11 terminal - libxt-dev package is normally not installed by default (at the debian page about gnuplot one can find the packages necessary to build gnuplot))
• make (if you have problems here with some latex errors than disable the latex tutorial during the configure stage with “–without-tutorial”, if you get a “103: makeinfo: not found” error message than install the texinfo package)
• sudo paco -lD make install

Than you have gnuplot installed with nice readline support (command line like in bash), a nice new wxWidgets terminal and a pdf terminal.