One satisfied McStas/pgplot customer :)

[Mark Hagen]

Hi Kristian,

Long time no see ! I am a bit surprised by your comment that a lot of people
have been having trouble with pgplot under Linux. I use Slackware and Red Hat
insetad of Debian and have never had any problems either with McStas or pgplot
under either. True I haven't tried the McStas plotting, all my pgplot is for my
own Fortran programmes. I've had less trouble with pgplot under Linux than under
Solaris (Sun) or Dec-Unix. The only subtlety is that pgplot is not F90
compatible, although there are only 3 changes to the pgplot source to solve that
problem. I use both g77 and the NAG F90 for Linux.

As for MS-Windows. If one has DVF (Digital Visual Fortran) then one can again
trivially produce the Fortran pgplot library for Windows. Again I use it all the
Fortran pgplot library all the time. I have never thought about the pgplot
C-library for Windows, although if one is careful can't one call the Fortran
routines from C ? Again, although I rarely use it on Windows, I had no trouble
producing the McStas with MS Visual C++ console app from the code you provided
on the web site.

Thus while others may be complaining about your choice of pgplot, you have at
least one satisfied customer ! :)

Cheers,


Mark


P.S.
Hope to see you again some time, not sure when, but some time.


Kristian Nielsen wrote:
>
> > Date: Fri, 03 Sep 1999 09:50:05 +0200
> > From: hansen at ill.fr (Thomas Hansen)
>
> > I managed to install McSTAS-1.1 under LinuxPPC on a Macintosh PowerBook G3,
> > as well as the installation on MacOS 8.6 using CodeWarrior. However, use of
> > gscan, mcplot and mcdisplay only is possible under Linux/Unix ... and there
> > there I encountered one problem (up to now ...) during the installation of
> > PGPERL. I post here the hopefully helpfull reply to my Linux-specific
> > problem.
>
> Hm, it is no absolutely clear to me if you did get pgplot and pgperl to
> work in the end -- I guess not? Anyway, I just checked the web site for
> Debian GNU/Linux. Debian includes working pgplot/pgperl out of the box,
> and Debian is available for PPC (as stable beta). HOWEVER, Debian PPC
> Linux does NOT include pgperl and pgplot, sadly. I wonder if there is
> some fundamental problem, though it does not appear likely.
>
> Anyway, I am getting really sorry about my choice of pgplot and pgperl
> for McStas, a LOT of people have experienced problems. Especially on
> Linux, I suspect because of poor Fortran support. At Risø we use Debian,
> and since pgplot/pgperl worked flawlessly there, I assumed other linuxes
> would be similar. Apparently that is not so, not to mention the Windows
> situation.
>
> Anyone knows a good replacement for pgplot? Or failing that, anyone have
> tips for pgplot and pgperl on (non-Debian) Linux?
>
>  - Kristian.