[Gretl-users] Building gretl on Linux

I have had a fairly frustrating, though ultimately successful, experience in building Gretl from source on OpenSUSE 10.2. The difficulties arose in a couple of areas for which the configuration files could be improved or other users might be warned. 1. The manual says that the default pre-fix for the installed version is /usr/local. Using that default, gretl is installed in /usr/local/gretl. In principle, that should mean that shared files go into /usr/local/share/gretl - and indeed that is what happens for some files. However, by default it seems that gretl looks for its help and database in /usr/share/gretl - and that it puts downloaded databases in the same place. As a consequence, after using all of the default options I found that gretl ran but generated a series error messages saying that it could not find up-to-date help files, etc. Further, the instructions for installing sample datasets, etc assume that the default pre-fix is /usr. I copied files that had been put in /usr/local/share/gretl to /usr/share/gretl, after which the error messages ceased. 2. I suspect that many of us forget to set permissions properly, especially for directories such as /usr/... As a consequence, gretl will refuse to create downloaded database files in its default location unless this has been done. Good and proper conduct for Linux but very confusing for non-experts. Would it not be better to provide an option for all such files for user abc to be placed in /home/abc/gretl, which is where the user's own settings, etc go by default? 3. Before resorting to compilation I tried to install the 1.7.5 rpm. It didn't work because the rpm requires very recent versions of various library files - notably libpixman-1.so which comes with recent versions of xorg-x11-libs, which are only used in new releases of Linux. Would it be possible to compile packaged version of gretl in a way that avoids reliance on libraries not available on most systems - after all stability and avoidance of unnecessary upgrades is part of the point of Linux. A corollary is to ask: what is the default target system for which the rpm packages are compliled? It seems to be fairly new releases of Fedora. 4. Finally, for OpenSUSE users it is work noting that there can be problems with the versions of BLAS and LAPACK available through the standard repositories and the libraries required for gretl. In particular, I have experienced a string of problems with the 3.0.xxx releases, but the 3.1.1 releases are not available in the standard repositories for any OpenSUSE version earlier than 10.3. The solution is to add the following repository to your list of sources (the two addresses point to the same place): http://software.opensuse.org/download/science/openSUSE_10.2/ or http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/science/openSUSE_10.2/ This contains up-to-date versions of BLAS, LAPACK, R, rkward, etc. There are equivalent repositories for 10.3 and 11.0 - just replace the openSUSE_10.2 by openSUSE_xx.xx. Regards Gordon Hughes