Building PLT-Scheme on Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex)

I had reason to build PLT-Scheme 4.1.5 the other day on an Ubuntu system (Intrepid Ibex) (OK, I was trying to get a build of Fluxus up and running).

It was almost entirely straightforward, except for not knowing ahead of time which development packages were needed for the build to complete successfully. As I had to run the process a number of times on an old laptop, it took quite a few hours with a number of manual interventions. Hopefully, the below steps will save someone some time:

1. Go to: download.plt-scheme.org
2. Choose the “Source code for Unix (X11)” platform, and click Download, seleccting the closest location to you.
3. Save the download to its own folder, then untar it with: tar -xzvf plt-4.1.5-src-unix.tgz
4. Change directory, to plt-4.5.1/src
5. You will need a C++ compiler: sudo apt-get install g++
6. Some windowing packages to compile MrEd: sudo apt-get install libX11-dev libxt-dev libxaw7-dev
7. You will also need libcrypto.so to prevent the compilation of the web-server’s scribble documentation from breaking horribly: sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
8. Run the following:
   • ./configure –enable-shared –prefix=/usr/local
   • make
   • sudo make install
9. Your shiny new build will be installed across the following locations: /usr/local/bin;/usr/local/lib/plt/collects;/usr/local/share/plt/doc;/usr/local/lib;/usr/local/include/plt;/usr/local/lib/plt;/usr/local/share/man