Tips for common plotting problems with gnumeric 1.0.*

[Adrian Custer <acuster nature berkeley edu>]

If you are having problems getting plotting to work with gnumeric 1.0, here 
are some things you can try.


Some Common Problems:
---------------------
o  gnome-print 0.30 and 0.31 are broken.
o  gnumeric spec file expects a tar.gz tarball.
o  guppi does not build rpm's correctly.
o  guppi may not be found by oaf.


Make sure you have ORBit installed.

A quick way to check that all is installed correctly for gnumeric 
is to run gnumeric's configure script in the gnumeric tarball. 
The guile requirement will probably complain for about your guile 
version but this is not critical for gnumeric. If configure quits you will
probably have to install missing pieces of software.

If guppi is present but causing problems you may have to run oaf-slay 
before trying again. This will kill any programs using oaf including Nautilus
and Evolution so you may want to quit them nicely before you run oaf-slay.


GNOME PRINT:
-----------
gnome-print  0.29 works and 0.32 (or more recent) works. Other gnome-print
versions may or may not work depending on what fonts you have installed.



GNUMERIC:
--------
o  gnumeric rpms all work.
o  rpm build works
o  source build works.

Essentially this means that gnumeric is not your problem. Note you may need
the *-devel-*rpm to build guppi so if your distribution splits gnumeric you
may need 2 rpms to continue. 

Note on the rpm build:
---------------------
If you  want to build gnumeric with rpm, the spec
file in the tarball expects a tar.gz. The gnumeric source is currently
released in two forms one with bzip compression (*.tar.bz2), the other 
with gzip compression (*.tar.gz). Get the latter source or once on your 
machine bunzip2 the source and then gzip it as in:

unbzip2 gnumeric....tar.bz
        (takes a while)
gzip gnumeric...tar
        (goes faster)
this will leave you with gnmeric....tar.gz which is what the spec file expects.

Quick rpm build instructions:
-----------------------------
put the new file (gnumeric...tar.gz) into
/usr/src/redhat/SOURCE/
or
/usr/src/RPMS/SOURCE/  (on mandrake)
then to build.
rpm -tb path/to/the/tarball/gnumeric...tar.gz
you may need to be root to build depending on the permissions.
the rpm build will put the rpm below
/usr/src/redhat/RPMS/
or
/usr/src/RPM/RPMS/
in a directory with the architecture you use (e.g. i586)
hunt around.
then as root do
rpm -Uvh /path/to/rpm/gnumeric-1.0.1.rpm


GUPPI:
-----
(it's guppi3 in cvs)

o  guppi rpm build fails
o  guppi by default installs in /usr/local/... It therefore may not be
   found by default by other gnome packages.

The spec file in guppi doesn't seem to work. If you can fix it please do and
then contact Jon Trowbridge with the fix.


To have guppi found by the system, you have two choices. If all your other gnome
pacakges are installed in one place you can install guppi there also. 
Alternatively, you can define GNOME_PATH so that the system can find guppi.

If all your GNOME packages are installed in one place (here we assume /usr/),
when you build guppi you can give it the prefix /usr/ as in:

tar xzf guppi-0.42.2.tar.gz
cd guppi-0.42.2
./configure --prefix=/usr/
make
(and as root)
make install

guppi has been pretty clean at 'make uninstall' so your system should
survive when rpm's become available.

Alternatively, you can set GNOME_PATH environmental variable to pick up 
guppi wherever you install it. By default it places itself in /usr/local/
so you would have to include that in GNOME_PATH.


FUN WITH PLOTS:
---------------

zoom the view with the mouse buttons. Play with the limited
configuration stuff by right clicking on the edge of the plot area (near
the black handles works well)



Sorry for the struggle, this will all get better when GNOME stabilizes.

cheers,
adrian