Known issues: X11, Anaconda, etc

  • Did you use the --recursive while cloning gdl ? Otherwise it will not compile.

  • GDL and X11: GDL now uses by default the wxWidgets engine for all graphics, plot windows and widgets. If GDL is compiled with the cmake option -DX11=ON (not the default), your GDL will also be able to use X11 plot windows, IF GDL is called with option -X ( gdl -X). In this case, provided an X11 server is running on the machine hosting GDL (e.g., the host is a Mac and XQartz is installed and started), the X11 plot windows will be able to be plotted remotely on any machine logged in via ssh -X. Note that X11 is not available under Windows. Due to the obsolescence of X11, we recommend to use remote desktop applications instead of X11.

  • Some installations of GraphicsMagick seem to lack the jpeg renderer (?). Use ImageMagick instead.

There are still issues with the wxWidgets engine under Linux, that you may encounter:

  • wxWidgets (using GTK) do not function well with fvwm2 (window positioning mainly). However see here.

  • DEVICE,SET_GRAPHICS_FUNCTION=x may not work correctly due to the absence of those basic graphic functions in the PANGO library, and in consequence in the in wxWidgets3.x. Some utilities (Graffer, Look) use this command to draw crosshairs on plots, and this PANGO ‘feature’ may prevent crosshair lines to be properly erased, making a mess of the plot.

  • Misshaped Hershey Fonts in PostScript device: this is a plplot bug, however see this workaround

  • gcc 13 (and perhaps other compiler) may report “multiply defined” error messages at link time and refuse to link: add -DSPLIT_SOURCES_FILES=OFF to the cmake command to solve this. Of course this means you cannot rely totally on the build_gdl.sh command file to build gdl. Instead, go to the gdl/build folder, type cmake -DSPLIT_SOURCES_FILES=OFF .., then go back to the home directory and re-type gdl/src/build_gdl.sh build.

Older issues, not sure if they still hold:

  • In presence of Anaconda (a python installer) there may be some troubles compiling GDL, see here

  • old GCC. It is still possible to compile GDL 1.0 versions (rc1, rc2, rc3) with old GC 4.8 versions (e.g. gcc version 4.8.4 (Ubuntu 4.8.4-2ubuntu1~14.04.4) but make check show that some numerical functions misbehave.