gretl on Slackware 13.0

I had some difficulties getting gretl 1.8.4 installed on Slackware 13. Here is what I did.

The problem was with the LAPACK libraries. After a lot of digging, I found that the problem was twofold: (a) I had built my own LAPACK library using the SlackBuild from slackbuilds.org, and gretl wasn't looking for the library in the right directory. (b) It wasn't finding libblas.a. (You can open config.log for gretl in the /tmp/gretl-1.8.4 directory to find the configuration problems.)

To handle the first problem, I had to edit the SlackBuild script to add the configure option --with-lapack-prefix=/usr to tell it to look for liblapack.a in /usr/lib. It will look in the /lib subdirectory of the directory you give, so if you pass the option --with-lapack-prefix=/usr/lib, it will look in /usr/lib/lib and quit with an error.

The second problem was caused by the fact that I had built my LAPACK library against ACML, AMD's optimized math libraries. I created a symbolic link of that library into /usr/local/lib. (There are probably alternatives, but I know it will be found if I put it there.) I had installed ACML in the default directory, so the symbolic link I created was

ln -s /opt/acml4.3.0/gfortran32/lib/libacml.a /usr/local/lib/libblas.a

The gretl SlackBuild built a package that installed properly and ran, but gave an error when I attempted to plot a graph. I don't know what the error was but it was fixed when I ran gretl from a Slackware 12.1 installation. After that, gretl plotting worked.