gretl doesn't start due to missing .gretl2rc

[John Pye]

Binary package hint: gretl

Gretl doesn't start in Ubuntu 7.10, seems that something is compiled wrong, or perhaps it is an upstream bug. I just installed gretl and when I attempt to run it from the command line, I get the following:

john@thunder:~$ gretl
old read_rc
Couldn't read /home/john/.gretl2rc

However note that gretlcli seems to work ok:

john@thunder:~$ gretlcli
gretl version 1.6.5
Copyright Ramu Ramanathan, Allin Cottrell and Riccardo "Jack" Lucchetti
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY
Current session: 2007/11/07 18:46

"help" gives a list of commands
Type "open filename" to open a data set
?

Cheers
JP

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

Is this symptom still reproducible in 8.10?

[John Pye (jdpipe)]

I think it's changed -- just tested it in 8.10. On a clean install, I get warnings on the first run, and can't produce plot output. But it seems to work on the second run OK. I tried deleting the .gretlrc file and the directory .gretl, and I get the same errors again. So there is something missing somewhere about the creation of this ~/.gretl directory.

john@roadwork:~$ gretl
Couldn't read /home/john/.gretl2rc
get_gretl_charset: using UTF-8

Read datafile /usr/share/gretl/data/greene/greene5_1.gdt
periodicity: 4, maxobs: 204,
observations range: 1950:1-2000:4

gnuplot_init: couldn't write to /home/john/.gretl/gpttmp.S17pJv
gnuplot_init: couldn't write to /home/john/.gretl/gpttmp.AMPdJ5