Installing PDL on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

These instructions apply to Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot. There are further dependencies for 11.04 to get the TriD module to properly compile. For this installation to work your computer must have access to Internet. Make sure you do have access to the internet by visiting some known web page with Firefox.

The newer Ubuntu releases have a bug where the PGPLOT module is not installed correctly. Use the following to install the prerequisites. Using a command prompt type:

sudo apt-get install gfortran build-essential libextutils-f77-perl libx11-dev \


pgplot5 libpgplot-perl libplplot-dev 

To install the dependencies for TriD we need the following installed.

sudo apt-get install libxi-dev libxmu-dev freeglut3-dev libgsl0-dev libnetpbm10-dev

Install PDL from the distribution Repository.

sudo apt-get install pdl

To install the latest PDL on Ubuntu will require using cpan to upgrade our environment. Using a command prompt type:

sudo cpan
upgrade /PDL/

I have had an issue where the above line had to be changed to

upgrade PDL

removing the regular expression delimiters was required for some reason.

quit

You should now be able to type in the same command prompt:

pdl2

and be presented with the pdl2 shell.