Hi Carlo,
I think one of the problems with the Debian distribution is that there is no libpng.a (static). There are libpng.so.2 and libpng.so.3 but these seem to give problems in the linker as the -lpng option fails in both the PGPLOT_install script and the ifeffit make command.
Is there a way to point to the shared object libraries instead?
Yes. It shouldn't need a static library, as long as it can find the shared one at 1) compile time, which is probably OK if it's set with -L..., and 2) run time, which should work but can s be painful. I'd expect that what you're seeing is that PGPLOT (and ifeffit) build OK but that the executables don't run, saying: ~> ifeffit ifeffit: error while loading shared libraries: libpng.so: cannot load shared object file: No such file or directory This probably means that libpng.so is in some location that the run-time loader doesn't know about. On linux, the 'ldd' command will show what shared libraries an executable, or even another shared library will try to load, and say which ones cannot be found. ~> ldd ifeffit libpng.so.2 => /usr/lib/libpng.so.2 (0x4002b000) libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0x4004c000) libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x4005a000) ... You can also run 'ldd libpgplot.so'. They should both point to an existing libpng.so, otherwise it would say libpng.so.2 => not found