Compiling Gnuplot 4.4.2 on CentOS 5.5
CentOS is a really fine platform for professional Linux servers which is - among others - characterized by stable software releases. However, especially in a research environment every once in a while you need a recent version of a software. CentOS ships with Gnuplot 4.0.0 but I need Gnuplot >=4.4. In case others need this, too, here are my compile instructions:
# make sure your system is uptodate yum clean all yum check-update yum update # based on a minimal installation, you need some packages in order to compile, I suggest yum install gcc gcc-c++ make libX11 xauth yum install cairo-devel pango-devel freetype-devel gd-devel cd /usr/local/src/ wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuplot/files/gnuplot/4.4.2/gnuplot-4.4.2.tar.gz/download tar xzf gnuplot-4.4.2.tar.gz cd gnuplot-4.4.2 less INSTALL # start compiling. I usually install self-compiled stuff at /opt/[PKG-NAME] ./configure --prefix=/opt/gnuplot442 make # make sure the shipped version of gnuplot is removed (this is probably not necessary but prevents version mix-up) yum remove gnuplot make install # you might want to add a symlink ln -s /opt/gnuplot442/bin/gnuplot /usr/bin/gnuplot