Hello,
I'm reporting a recent experience in case there is someone else out
there wanting to try out octave's fltk alternative to gnuplot under
RHEL/Centos/SL. I'm running SL 6.5, and the octave-3.4.3-1.el6.x86_64
available from EPEL only offers gnuplot, although
/usr/share/doc/octave-3.4.3/NEWS announces the presence of fltk.
While I was at it, I thought I would get a more recent octave than 3.4
and downloaded octave-3.8.1.tar.gz from the octave website.
../configure reported some missing libraries that yum located in various
devel packages, but even after installing the packages I continued to
get a report that OpenGL was missing and that native graphics would
therefore be unavailable.
I eventually spotted a "-lGL not found" line in config.log, in spite of
the fact that /usr/lib64/libGL.so was present, having been provided by
mesa-libGL-devel. The problem was that it was a broken symbolic link to
libGL.so.1.2.0, which rpm -ql says mesa-libGL should provide. But what
I actually had was libGL.so.1.2 instead. Making libGL.so point to that
fixed the problem and octave now offers a choice of gnuplot and fltk
graphics toolkits. (It also offers a matlab-like gui, which, as they
tell you, is not yet ready for everyday use.)
My guess is that the library name mixup is more likely to be a RedHat
problem than a Scientific Linux one, so I have reported it on their
bugzilla.
Stephen Isard
