Anyway, below you’ll find the source code of my FindGSL.cmake module.

# Try to find gnu scientific library GSL
# See
# http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/  and
# http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gsl.htm
#
# Based on a script of Felix Woelk and Jan Woetzel
# (www.mip.informatik.uni-kiel.de)
#
# It defines the following variables:
#  GSL_FOUND - system has GSL lib
#  GSL_INCLUDE_DIRS - where to find headers
#  GSL_LIBRARIES - full path to the libraries
#  GSL_LIBRARY_DIRS, the directory where the PLplot library is found.

#  CMAKE_GSL_CXX_FLAGS  = Unix compiler flags for GSL, essentially "`gsl-config --cxxflags`"
#  GSL_LINK_DIRECTORIES = link directories, useful for rpath on Unix
#  GSL_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS = rpath on Unix

set( GSL_FOUND OFF )
set( GSL_CBLAS_FOUND OFF )

# Windows, but not for Cygwin and MSys where gsl-config is available
if( WIN32 AND NOT CYGWIN AND NOT MSYS )
	# look for headers
  find_path( GSL_INCLUDE_DIR
    NAMES gsl/gsl_cdf.h gsl/gsl_randist.h
    )
  if( GSL_INCLUDE_DIR )
  	# look for gsl library
    find_library( GSL_LIBRARY
      NAMES gsl
    )
    if( GSL_LIBRARY )
      set( GSL_INCLUDE_DIRS ${GSL_INCLUDE_DIR} )
      get_filename_component( GSL_LIBRARY_DIRS ${GSL_LIBRARY} PATH )
      set( GSL_FOUND ON )
    endif( GSL_LIBRARY )

		# look for gsl cblas library
    find_library( GSL_CBLAS_LIBRARY
        NAMES gslcblas
      )
    if( GSL_CBLAS_LIBRARY )
      set( GSL_CBLAS_FOUND ON )
    endif( GSL_CBLAS_LIBRARY )

    set( GSL_LIBRARIES ${GSL_LIBRARY} ${GSL_CBLAS_LIBRARY} )
  endif( GSL_INCLUDE_DIR )

  mark_as_advanced(
    GSL_INCLUDE_DIR
    GSL_LIBRARY
    GSL_CBLAS_LIBRARY
  )
else( WIN32 AND NOT CYGWIN AND NOT MSYS )
  if( UNIX OR MSYS )
		find_program( GSL_CONFIG_EXECUTABLE gsl-config
			/usr/bin/
			/usr/local/bin
		)

		if( GSL_CONFIG_EXECUTABLE )
			set( GSL_FOUND ON )

      # run the gsl-config program to get cxxflags
      execute_process(
        COMMAND sh "${GSL_CONFIG_EXECUTABLE}" --cflags
        OUTPUT_VARIABLE GSL_CFLAGS
        RESULT_VARIABLE RET
        ERROR_QUIET
        )
      if( RET EQUAL 0 )
        string( STRIP "${GSL_CFLAGS}" GSL_CFLAGS )
        separate_arguments( GSL_CFLAGS )

        # parse definitions from cflags; drop -D* from CFLAGS
        string( REGEX MATCHALL "-D[^;]+"
          GSL_DEFINITIONS  "${GSL_CFLAGS}" )
        string( REGEX REPLACE "-D[^;]+;" ""
          GSL_CFLAGS "${GSL_CFLAGS}" )

        # parse include dirs from cflags; drop -I prefix
        string( REGEX MATCHALL "-I[^;]+"
          GSL_INCLUDE_DIRS "${GSL_CFLAGS}" )
        string( REPLACE "-I" ""
          GSL_INCLUDE_DIRS "${GSL_INCLUDE_DIRS}")
        string( REGEX REPLACE "-I[^;]+;" ""
          GSL_CFLAGS "${GSL_CFLAGS}")

        message("GSL_DEFINITIONS=${GSL_DEFINITIONS}")
        message("GSL_INCLUDE_DIRS=${GSL_INCLUDE_DIRS}")
        message("GSL_CFLAGS=${GSL_CFLAGS}")
      else( RET EQUAL 0 )
        set( GSL_FOUND FALSE )
      endif( RET EQUAL 0 )

      # run the gsl-config program to get the libs
      execute_process(
        COMMAND sh "${GSL_CONFIG_EXECUTABLE}" --libs
        OUTPUT_VARIABLE GSL_LIBRARIES
        RESULT_VARIABLE RET
        ERROR_QUIET
        )
      if( RET EQUAL 0 )
        string(STRIP "${GSL_LIBRARIES}" GSL_LIBRARIES )
        separate_arguments( GSL_LIBRARIES )

        # extract linkdirs (-L) for rpath (i.e., LINK_DIRECTORIES)
        string( REGEX MATCHALL "-L[^;]+"
          GSL_LIBRARY_DIRS "${GSL_LIBRARIES}" )
        string( REPLACE "-L" ""
          GSL_LIBRARY_DIRS "${GSL_LIBRARY_DIRS}" )
      else( RET EQUAL 0 )
        set( GSL_FOUND FALSE )
      endif( RET EQUAL 0 )

			MARK_AS_ADVANCED(
				GSL_CFLAGS
			)
			message( STATUS "Using GSL from ${GSL_PREFIX}" )
		else( GSL_CONFIG_EXECUTABLE )
			message( STATUS "FindGSL: gsl-config not found.")
		endif( GSL_CONFIG_EXECUTABLE )
	endif( UNIX OR MSYS )
endif( WIN32 AND NOT CYGWIN AND NOT MSYS )

if( GSL_FOUND )
  if( NOT GSL_FIND_QUIETLY )
    message( STATUS "FindGSL: Found both GSL headers and library" )
  endif( NOT GSL_FIND_QUIETLY )
else( GSL_FOUND )
  if( GSL_FIND_REQUIRED )
    message( FATAL_ERROR "FindGSL: Could not find GSL headers or library" )
  endif( GSL_FIND_REQUIRED )
endif( GSL_FOUND )

Assume you want to download the binutils binary package from the MinGW project. If you go to the download site of binutils and click on “direct link” you get “http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/mingw/GNU%20Binutils/binutils-2.20.1/binutils-2.20.1-2-mingw32-bin.tar.gz”. If you just use “curl -O URL” nothing happens. Adding the option “-v” some more output is shown:

* About to connect() to downloads.sourceforge.net port 80 (#0)
*   Trying 216.34.181.59... connected
* Connected to downloads.sourceforge.net (216.34.181.59) port 80 (#0)
> GET /project/mingw/GNU%20Binutils/binutils-2.20.1/binutils-2.20.1-2-mingw32-bin.tar.gz HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.16.4 (i386-apple-darwin9.0) libcurl/7.16.4 OpenSSL/0.9.7l zlib/1.2.3
> Host: downloads.sourceforge.net
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 302 Found
< X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.9
< Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="binutils-2.20.1-2-mingw32-bin.tar.gz"
< Location: http://surfnet.dl.sourceforge.net/project/mingw/GNU%20Binutils/binutils-2.20.1/binutils-2.20.1-2-mingw32-bin.tar.gz
< Content-type: text/html
< Content-Length: 0
< Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:50:34 GMT
< Server: lighttpd/1.4.26
<
* Connection #0 to host downloads.sourceforge.net left intact
* Closing connection #0

Sourceforge redirects to a mirror server, but curl doesn’t follow it. Fortunately the “-L” option tells curl to follow this redirection. So

curl -L -O http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/mingw/GNU%20Binutils/binutils-2.20.1/binutils-2.20.1-2-mingw32-bin.tar.gz

works. This sourceforge trac ticket provided the information. Additionally it’s possible to shorten the URL a bit. Instead of the long URL above you could also use:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/mingw/binutils-2.20.1-2-mingw32-bin.tar.gz

Ok, it’s not that much shorter but still. I’m not sure if this always works, at least for MinGW packages it does.

Go to Options->Open User Options File and paste the following

if PLAT_GTK
  position.left=15
  position.top=32
  position.width=800
  position.height=700
statusbar.visible=1
line.margin.visible=1
load.on.activate=1
toolbar.visible=1
caret.line.back=#FFF600
caret.line.back.alpha=50

# Indentation
tabsize=2
indent.size=2
use.tabs=1

open.filter=\
$(all.files)\
All Source|$(source.files)|\
$(filter.ada)\
$(filter.conf)\
$(filter.asm)\
$(filter.bash)\
$(filter.caml)\
$(filter.cmake)\
$(filter.cpp)\
$(filter.ch)\
$(filter.css)\
$(filter.d)\
$(filter.fortran)\
$(filter.inno)\
$(filter.java)\
$(filter.js)\
$(filter.kix)\
$(filter.lua)\
$(filter.pascal)\
$(filter.perl)\
$(filter.php)\
$(filter.properties)\
$(filter.ps)\
$(filter.python)\
$(filter.r)\
$(filter.tcl)\
$(filter.tex)\
$(filter.text)\
$(filter.vb)

#font.base=font:!Bitstream Vera Sans Mono,size:11
font.base=font:!Monospace,size:11
font.small=font:!Monospace,size:10
font.comment=font:!Monospace,size:11

The following instructions are mainly taken from this site, but  I want to keep them on my site for reference. So

• first download Debian Etch. The netinst CD image will suffice.
• Create a new virtual machine, Linux/Debian, 1GB, create a new 20GB harddisc. Attach the downloaded iso image as cdrom.
• Start the machine and install Debian Etch as usual.
• After the installation process, update the system with “apt-get update” and “apt-get upgrade” as root.
• Prepare system for kernel module build with “apt-get install build-essential module-assistant” as root.
• As root run “m-a prepare” so that modules can be build.
• Now mount the guest additions image, run “cd /cdrom” and “ sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run” as root.

In fact Debian Etch doesn’t run perfectly, e.g. you can’t change the screen size to any arbitrary value. And Debian crashes during a reboot. But it’s good enough to just compile your executable. The main development should still be done on your favorite OS/Linux distribution.

• reboot

Prerequisites

We need to make sure some packages are already installed before we try to compile gnuplot

• libwxgtk2.8-dev – for the wxt terminal
• libpango1.0-dev – for the cairo (pdf, png) and wxt terminals
• libreadline5-dev – readline support (editing command lines)
• libx11-dev and libxt-dev – X11 terminal
• texinfo (optional) – needed for the tutorial
• libgd2-xpm-dev (optional) – old png, jpeg and gif terminals based on libgd

This command (run in a terminal) will install all prerequisites if not already installed:

sudo apt-get install libwxgtk2.8-dev libpango1.0-dev libreadline5-dev libx11-dev libxt-dev texinfo libgd2-xpm-dev

Then we download and compile gnuplot (run each command/line in a terminal)

• wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuplot/files/gnuplot/4.4.0/gnuplot-4.4.0.tar.gz/download
• tar xzf gnuplot-4.4.0.tar.gz
• mkdir build && cd build
• ../gnuplot-4.4.0/configure --with-readline=gnu

check if you find the lines in the output at the bottom:

X Window System terminal: yes
jpeg terminal: yes
gif terminal: yes (with animated gif)
png terminal: yes
    (jpeg, gif and png terminals can use TTF fonts)
wxt terminal: yes
cairo-based pdf and png terminals: yes
Readline library: GNU readline library with  -lncurses

• make

(if you have problems here with some latex errors than disable the latex tutorial during the configure stage with “--without-tutorial”, if you get a “103: makeinfo: not found” error message than install the texinfo package)

• sudo make install

Then you have gnuplot installed with nice readline support (command line like in bash), a nice new wxWidgets terminal and a pdf terminal based on cairo.

After you have all the images in a folder, install ffmpeg, in Ubuntu/Debian Linux e.g.

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

In order to make a movie (mp4 quicktime) out of the images you need to issue the following command

ffmpeg -qscale 5 -r 20 -b 9600 -i img%04d.png movie.mp4

The options are

• -qscale 5 … define fixed video quantizer scale (VBR) where 1 is the best and 31 the worst. Since mpeg/jpeg has problems to compress line graphics it’s a good idea to set this variable close to 1. You get a big movie file, but otherwise the movie doesn’t look, well, that good.
• -r … framerate
• -b … video bitrate
• -i input files, %04d says that we have four numbers in the filename where the number is filled with zeros left of it.
• movie.mp4 is the filename, the extension says that it is a quicktime movie. You can also create a Macromedia Flash movie by using the .flv extension.

Links:

• Homepage, where I found most of these instructions: http://electron.mit.edu/~gsteele/ffmpeg/
• ffmpeg Homepage: http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/
• ffmpeg Documentation: http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg-doc.html

<?php
// Show all information, defaults to INFO_ALL
phpinfo();
?>

Then browse to this file via http://localhost/info.php (replace localhost with the servername if necessary) and look for the line

upload_max_filesize 2M 2M

which will show you the actual maximum file size. In order to change that open a ssh connection to your server and edit the file /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini with

sudo nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

search for “upload_max_filesize” with Ctrl-W and change “2M” to “20M”. Save the file with Ctrl-O and exit with Ctrl-X. Restart the apache server with

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

and visit again http://localhost/info.php to check if the maximum file size was changed.

• Install sshfs via “sudo apt-get install sshfs”
• Add your user to the fuse group “sudo adduser user fuse” and logout/login to become member of this group.
• On the Mac OS X host allow ssh access: System Preferences->Sharing, Service “Remote Login”. Make sure your user is allowed to access via ssh
• Make a directory where you want to mount the host directory, e.g. “mkdir ~/MacDocs”
• Than mount a directory from the host with “sshfs -o uid=1000,gid=1000 username@server:/Users/username/ ~/MacDocs”. Here the uid and gid should be of your username, have a look in /etc/passwd. That’s it.
• Unmount the directory with fusermount -u MacDocs.

Links: http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/FUSE/sshfs (German), http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/10/28/how-………-sshfs/, http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/SSH (German)

It’s also possible to have the directory automounted at system start, but I never managed to not enter my password or passphrase, so I just run a script with the “sshfs …” command if I need access to the host.

Some months ago I wrote a small Howto about installing Gnuplot on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn with readline, pdf and wxWidgets terminal support. It turned out, that this howto was of interest for many people, since this blog post was the most visited until Gutsy Gibbon came out – and the readline problem was obviously solved, since it works now if you install the standard Gnuplot package. Still the pdf and wxWidgets terminal are not compiled in by default, therefore I wrote a new (shorter) howto about including this terminals.

So here are the instructions:

Instead of compiling wxWidgets on our own, we just get the libwxgtk2.8-dev package. The version number is only at 2.8.4 (and wxWidgets already reached 2.8.7) but there shouldn’t be much problems.

Than we are going to install the PDFlib lite

• Download PDFlib Lite
• tar xzf PDFlib-Lite-7.0.2.tar.gz
• cd PDFlib-Lite-7.0.2
• ./configure
• make
• sudo paco -lD make install (or just sudo make install if you don’t use paco)
• sudo ldconfig

Then we compile gnuplot

• Download gnuplot 4.2.2
• tar xzf gnuplot-4.2.2.tar.gz
• cd gnuplot-4.2.2
• ./configure –with-readline=gnu (check if we have the lines “pdf terminal: yes” and “wxt terminal: yes (EXPERIMENTAL)”, if you miss the jpeg, png and gif terminal install the libgd2-xpm-dev package; also check if you find “Readline library: GNU readline library with -lncurses”, if it says only minimal readline support than install the libreadline5-dev package; you need also the libx11-dev and libxt-dev package for the X11 terminal – libxt-dev package is normally not installed by default (at the debian page about gnuplot one can find the packages necessary to build gnuplot))
• make (if you have problems here with some latex errors than disable the latex tutorial during the configure stage with “–without-tutorial”, if you get a “103: makeinfo: not found” error message than install the texinfo package)
• sudo paco -lD make install (or just sudo make install if you don’t use paco)

Than you have gnuplot installed with nice readline support (command line like in bash), a nice new wxWidgets terminal and a pdf terminal also on Gutsy Gibbon.

ssh -c arcfour,blowfish-cbc -XC host.com


to connect to with ssh. And guess what? This really improves the situation, especially for gnuplot. Thanks Samat!