PSPP FAQ

• What is PSPP?
• What can PSPP do?
• What do I need to run PSPP?
• Where can I get PSPP?
• How do I install PSPP?
• How do I start using PSPP?
• What documentation is available?
• How can I get more information on PSPP?
• PSPP lacks this feature which I really need. How can I get PSPP to support it?
• Can I help out with PSPP development?
• What does PSPP stand for?
• I'm having troubles while building release 0.4.0. What to do?

What is PSPP?

PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It interprets commands in the SPSS language and produces tabular output in ASCII, PostScript, or HTML format.

One goal of the PSPP project is compatibility with the SPSS language. It currently features:

• High-quality output formatting:
  • Presentation-quality tables on suitable devices, such as laser printers and raster displays. This is currently implemented through a PostScript driver. A simple HTML tables driver is also available.
  • Other devices, such as terminals and dot-matrix printers, are supported through an ASCII driver. IBM PC box-drawing characters can also be used. Bold and italics are supported if the underlying device supports them.
  • Output can be directed to multiple devices at once, for instance to a dot-matrix printer and a PostScript printer, and retain the unique output properties of each device.
  • All this can be done on any operating system that PSPP supports. Though the latest versions of what PSPP replaces support similar functionality, they do so only under non-free Microsoft operating systems.
• Portability: PSPP is easy to port. It should be simple to port it to any POSIX.1 compliant operating system having an ANSI C compiler.

What can PSPP do?

Quite a lot or not very much, depending on how you look at it. PSPP supports most transformations and utilities. But it only supports a few statistical analysis procedures. This major lack will be addressed in future versions.

Refer to the manual for the complete list of supported commands.

What do I need to run PSPP?

Before you install PSPP, you will need to install certain prerequisites:

• An ANSI C compiler and tool chain.
• The GNU Scientific Library (GSL), version 1.6 or later, including libgslcblas included with GSL.
• Perl, version 5.005_03 or later. (Perl is required during build but not after installation.)
• pkg-config (only if you need to regenerate configure after modifying configure.ac).
• Optional: libncurses. Without it, PSPP will assume it is running in an 80x25 terminal.
• Optional: libreadline and libhistory. Without them, interactive command editing and history features will be disabled.
• Optional: libplot (from GNU plotutils). Without it, graphing features will not work. If you do not have it installed, you must run configure with --without-libplot.
• Optional: GTK+ version 2.6.0 or later, plus libglade 2.0 or later. Without them, the GUI will not be built. If you do not have these installed, you must run configure with --without-gui.

i386 Debian GNU/Linux is the primary development platform, but previous versions have been compiled and tested under other OSes, so porting should not be difficult.

Where can I get PSPP?

Source code for the latest release of PSPP is available at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/pspp/.

Obsolete versions may be obtained from ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/pspp/.

Development sources are available from CVS at http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/pspp.

How do I install PSPP?

For the released versions of PSPP, do:

tar -xzf pspp-0.4.0.tar.gz
cd pspp-0.4.0
./configure
make 
make check
su
make install

If you're compiling from the CVS snapshot look in the file README.developer and follow the instructions there.

How do I get started using PSPP?

After you've built and installed PSPP, try this:

1. Using your favourite editor, write a file (name it myfile.syn) containing the following:

   DATA LIST LIST /name (a25) quantity (f8).
   BEGIN DATA.
   widgets 10345
   oojars 2345
   dubreys 98
   thingumies 518
   END DATA.
    
   LIST.
    
   DESCRIPTIVES /quantity
    /statistics ALL.
        

2. Enter the command pspp myfile.syn
3. Look at your results in pspp.list

PSPP is very versatile and there are lots of different types of statistical analysis possible. You need to become familiar with the documentation to unleash its full potential.

What documentation is available?

The PSPP manual, written in Texinfo format, is the primary reference for using PSPP. Besides the Texinfo format a few other formats are available like HTML and PDF. A few additional documentation files are included in the source distribution:

README

A quick introduction to PSPP.

INSTALL

Notes on building and installing.

ChangeLog

Details of the latest bleeding edge changes.

A manual for PSPP in French, written independently by Julie Séguéla, is also available in PDF and LaTeX formats.

How can I get more information on PSPP?

There are a few resources for PSPP information. The first is this FAQ and related documentation in the distribution and on the web site. The second is the PSPP source code itself, if you are programmatically inclined.

For discussion with other PSPP users our mailinglist pspp-users@gnu.org is available. You can subscribe to this list at http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-users

Finally, we look forward to all comments and questions related to PSPP. You can find our IRC channel on the freenode network. The channelname is #pspp. Or you can send an email to pspp-dev@gnu.org

PSPP lacks this feature which I really need. How can I get PSPP to support it?

There are several ways:

• Download the source code and implement it yourself.
• Hire somebody to implement it for you.
• Send an email to the developers and ask for the feature. The developers are interested in hearing about what users want.

Any help you can give is appreciated. See the following question.

Can I help out with PSPP development?

Yes. Visit http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pspp-dev where you can subscribe to the mailing list or view the archives.

When you have fixed a bug or improved some parts of PSPP, you can submit your patches at http://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?group=pspp

If you have any questions about how you can help out, send a mail to pspp-dev@gnu.org

What does PSPP stand for?

PSPP does not have any official acronymic expansion. But they're easy to come up with. For example:

• Perfect Statistics Professionally Presented.
• Probabilities Sometimes Prevent Problems.
• People Should Prefer PSPP.

Send along your favorites!

I'm having troubles while building release 0.4.0. What to do?

A few system-specific issues have been noted. These may be PSPP bugs or system bugs; we have not yet been able to track them down precisely:

• On Solaris, one or more tests may fail `make check'. We have only seen this reported on Solaris 9 with GCC 3.4.2. Our reporter says that turning off optimization (with -O0) at least masked the symptoms.
• On Mac OS X, GCC 4.0.0 build 4061 has been observed to cause some tests to fail. Later builds should work fine.

Finally, a few extra notes:

• The Sun WorkShop compiler will not work out of the box in this release. Use GCC instead. We will fix this for the next release.
• GCC 4.x reports an inordinate number of warnings for this release. You may ignore these for now. We will fix these for the next release.

If you encounter other troubles than the above noted ones. Please contact us.