Installing Cell SDK under Ubuntu

The Cell SDK from IBM, currently at v2.1, is only officially supported under Fedora. It's simply a bunch of RPMs so most RPM-based distros should work (I know that RedHat EL 5 works, for instance). However, if you're using a Debian-based distro you might need to make some preparations. Here are some simple steps to follow to get the SDK running under Ubuntu. I only tested this under Feisty, and I think it should work with Edgy as well, but for older releases you'll need to get a backported glibc. So let's start ($ denotes the console prompt):

1) Ubuntu doesn't use bash! It uses the more lightweight alternative dash, which doesn't like the SDK's installation script. Install bash:

$ apt-get install bash

2) Then make sure that /bin/sh actually points to bash:

$ ls -l /bin/sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2007-06-17 17:38 /bin/sh -> bash

3) Another tool to replace. Ubuntu uses mawk while Fedora uses gawk. We'll install gawk and make sure that awk points to it:

$ apt-get install gawk
$ update-alternatives --set awk /usr/bin/gawk

4) The installation script checks for RPM dependencies, and this will definitely fail. We'll modify it so that it doesn't make any checks, and we'll install the equivalent debs manually. Simply, replace each "rpm -i" by "rpm -i --nodeps":

$ sed -i 's/rpm -i/rpm -i --nodeps/g' [path_to_sdk]/software/cellsdk

5) Install the required packages:

$ apt-get install rpm freeglut3 freeglut3-dev libxmu-dev libxext-dev gcc make perl rsync flex byacc tk8.4 tcl8.4 libelf1

6) Make symlinks to libtck and libtk:

$ cd /usr/lib
$ ln -s libtcl8.4.so.0 libtcl8.4.so
$ ln -s libtk8.4.so.0 libtk8.4.so

7) Finally, run the installation script as root:

$ cd [path_to_sdk]/software
$ sudo ./cellsdk install

And that should be it!