Appendix A. Obtaining, building, and installing gnuplot
The easiest way to install gnuplot on your local computer is to download and install a precompiled package. If you’re running Linux, there’s a good chance gnuplot is already installed; if not, you’ll have no difficulty finding an RPM or Debian package on the internet. There are MacPorts packages for Mac OS X and precompiled binaries for Windows as well. In section A.3, we consider some of these options in more detail.
If you’d like to be totally up to date and have access to the newest features, or if you want to start hacking on gnuplot yourself, you’ll have to build from source. Section A.4 in this appendix will help you get started.
You can inspect what compile-time options your version of gnuplot was built with from within a gnuplot session. The pertinent commands are show version and show version long. The first version will tell you little more than the version number, but the second version will also print the compile-time options to the screen. A - prefix indicates an option that is disabled, a + prefix one that is enabled.