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GLE 3.5 for Linux
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This page is rather out of date. For the latest information, see:
What is GLE?
GLE is a high performance tool for producing publication
quality graphs and figures. It is somewhere between a
graphical drawing program and a
programming language. It produces PS (PostScript) or EPS
(Encapsulated Postscript) output.
It was originally written by
Chris Pugmire in the early 1990s, but has recently been
extended by Vincent LaBella at the University of Arkansas.
It is currently in version 3.5, and the current release number
is R0.23 (9th Feb 2001). This page gives a Linux-specific
installation.
(If you want a Windows version, go to the
GLE v3.5 homepage)
Instructions for installation:
RPM method
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GLE can now be installed using an RPM provided by
Dr Torsten Seemann. To do this, download:
GLE-3.5-1.i386.rpm and install in the usual way for RPMs.
This installs on RH7.x (and probably RH8.0) in
the directory /usr/local/gle/bin.
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Compile it yourself method
- Uncompress the files
tar xvzf gle3.5-R0.23.linux.tar.gz
This will make a subdirectory gle35 from whichever directory
you have placed the zip files.
- Check to see if you have the ANSIColor Perl module installed.
The Perl module ANSIColor will already be installed on your
system if your version of Perl is fairly new (I am told
it is default with Perl 5.6). Try
locate ANSIColor.pm
to check to see if it is there on your system.
If it isn't,
you can install it from the link further down this page.
Or, you can choose
not to bother, but then you will get a black-and-white
text interface rather than the colour interface
(see the
screenshot).
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If you are running a new version of RedHat, e.g. version 7.0-7.2,
there seems to be some problem with the new version of gcc which
means that GLE3.5 no longer compiles correctly. Therefore, implement
the solution indicated below.
Problem with RedHat 7.0, 7.1, 7.2:
The gcc compiler on RedHat 7
will not compile gle correctly. Here are two
ways of solving this.
- One workaround which
you can do to "downgrade" a RedHat 7.x system (to actually
make it work!) is to do the following: (1) make sure
egcs and egcs++ are intalled (if not,
install the rpm) and then (2) change directory
into /usr/bin and do
mv gcc gcc-old
ln -s egcs gcc
mv g++ g++-old
ln -s egcs++ g++
A drastic solution, but it works.
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Torsten Seemann has
managed to do a better job than my solution
and has compiled gle without resorting
to egcs. He used the standard Redhat 7.3
gcc-2.96-116.7.2 package
but edited the file config.i to change
LIBS :=-lstdc++ -lncurses
to
LIBS :=-lstdc++ -lncurses -lm
Problem with RedHat 8.0:
Red Hat 8.0 reportedly leads to further problems
which are not fixed by this.
I have not tried RH8.0 yet myself, so I don't
know what the problem is and hence I can offer no
solution at present.
I have heard that by adding
using namespace std; at the top of some of the
files, this problem can be fixed. Hopefully it won't be
too long before I can get a version which works on
everything!
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- Type the following
cd gle35
./configure
[at this point you will be asked to choose the directory into
which you install the executables and also whether
you have the ANSIColor Perl module installed.]
- Then type
make
make install [you may need to be root for this, depending on
your choice of installation directory]
make test [optional]
The make test part simply makes the encapsulated Postscript for
a simple test file and compares it with one generated earlier, reporting
any differences. The
only difference it should report is the time it was performed which is
written in a header comment.
(One word of warning: when you run make install,
it will produce the message
9: Could not open inittex.ini file
This looks like
an error message, but is perfectly normal. It cannot find
inittex.ini so generates its own, which is what it is
supposed to do.)
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Instructions for installation of Perl module:
The Perl module ANSIColor should be already installed on your
system if your version of Perl is fairly new (I am told
it is default with Perl 5.6). Try
locate ANSIColor.pm
to check to see if it is there on your system.
If it is not, you can install it by downloading the module from
here.
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ANSIColor-1.03.tar.gz
| (optional Perl module) | 8312 bytes |
You may already have this installed if your Perl
installation is reasonably up-to-date. |
Type
tar xvzf ANSIColor-1.03.tar.gz
change into the
ANSIColor-1.03 directory and follow the instructions there.
(This is very quick.)
The Perl module is part of the CPAN
distribution. It is a small piece of code, but gives you
a nice colour interface. It was written by Russ Albery.
You could also get the same file straight from the
CPAN archive by clicking
here.
Usage:
You can use the
gle_ps command to run everything, but it is probably
better to use the 'gle' command which allows you
to do things like
gle -deps *.gle
or gle -dps a*.gle
(This will only work nicely if you have installed the
ANSIColor Perl module.)
The file 'gle' can be placed anywhere, but it helps to
be in a directory which is in your current path.
Changes from Vincent LaBella's R0.23 version:
(1) Edited makefile and config.i to work under Linux, (2) converted
files to remove Windows carriage returns, (3) included new
configure script, (4) included Perl wrapper which allows
you to use wildcards on the command-line, and (5) rezipped all
the source-files and font-files
so that they open from a single-file. (6) Updated sample_compare.eps.
(7) Added compiler option -lm to fbuild compiler options in the makefile.
Historical version:
If you want to play with GLE as it used to be, here is
the original 3.3 version of GLE, complete with various utilities.
Further links:
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Till Burkert, Bryn Jeffries
and Rainer Schork for some useful comments on the installation.
Thanks to Vincent LaBella and Chris Pugmire for GLE.
Thanks to David Parfitt for the GLE manual.
Thanks to Graham Lee for the emacs gle-mode.
Thanks to Torsten Seemann for the new RPM and other suggestions.
Stephen Blundell. Page last updated 20th March 2003.