Gnuplot for gretl on Linux

If you're running on Linux, it's possible that the version of gnuplot provided by your distro may be too old to work with gretl (we require version 5.0 or higher).

To get an up-to-date build of gnuplot for use with gretl you can build gnuplot from the CVS source yourself.

Build from source

Note that for this to succeed you will need to have the "devel" packages for GTK+ and Xorg installed.

 export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@gnuplot.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gnuplot
 cvs login
 cvs -z3 checkout gnuplot

Just hit Enter when asked for a password. Then

 sh ./prepare
 ./configure --prefix=/opt/gnuplot
 make
 sudo make install

The choice of installing to /opt/gnuplot is designed to avoid collisions with gnuplot as installed by your Linux distro.

Using the new gnuplot

In gretl, go to Tools/Preferences/General/Programs and change the "gnuplot" entry to read

 /opt/gnuplot/bin/gnuplot

Then re-start gretl.