Problem/s with Maxima, et al (on Ubuntu 8.10)



I got wxWidgets to install & wxMaxima 0.8.1 (thanks Alexey!). However, 
*no* command line in wxMaxima... strange behaviours in the terminal, 
etc. I found out (from another circumstance) how to un-install, thinking 
that, as the terminal welcome info showed, the 5.17 build was for i686 
architecture & my machine is an AMD Mobile Athelon +3000 (i386... I do 
believe). Anyway I went back to Maxima 5.16.3, hoping this would set me 
up correctly with Maxima... It was not to be... (though I did *run* the 
tests in xMaxima & no unexpected errors????).

This is was, however, an error message I got when trying to run the plot 
demonstrations in xMaxima:

xmaxima error
Maxima encountered a Lisp error
Unix error 32 9EPIPE): Broken pipe, child process terminate or socket closed
Automatically continuing.
To reenable the Lisp debugger set *debugger-hook* to nil.

This is the welcome message when I ran Maxima in the terminal ('gnuplot: 
not found'):

henry at henry-heron:~/maxima-5.16.3$ xmaxima
Maxima 5.16.3 http://maxima.sourceforge.net
Using Lisp CLISP 2.44.1 (2008-02-23)
Distributed under the GNU Public License. See the file COPYING.
Dedicated to the memory of William Schelter.
The function bug_report() provides bug reporting information.
(%i1) jfa: starting server on port 4008
/bin/sh: gnuplot: not found

Any one with ideas about what is, or is not going on here? Further 
tests? CLISP problem? Or... or...

Henry