How to install c++ library on linux

Question

I am a noob in Linux environment.
I am using ubuntu 13.10 and I want to install Armadillo. The readme file said that I should install three other libraries first, LAPACK, BL

Answer 1

Edit: While my answer is correct, @Pauls's answer will get you to where you need to go, much faster. Assuming you can live with the ubuntu system default configuration of the LAPACK and friends.

http://www.netlib.org/lapack/lawn81/node10.html Explains the steps to install LAPACK.

Answer 2

1. From a linux terminal at the console, enter sudo synaptic

   Synaptic is basically a GUI built around apt-get and related commands.

   A window will appear, like this one:

   

2. In the "Quick filter" box, enter each of these to seach for packages and then checkbox select the various packages if they are unselected. You probably want the -dev versions to get the C/C++ headers and the -doc packages to get the man pages, as well as the main package:

   • libblas
   • liblapack
   • libatlas
3. Click the green apply checkmark and the packages will be downloaded and installed
4. Enjoy!

Note: sometimes people need the very latest libraries, for bugfixes, extra features, but the ones available through synaptic will be older, from your official linux distribution archive. This can be fixed by adding ppa repositories with the add-apt-repository command, if there is a ppa repository with the latest code somewhere and you know its name/address.

If you need to do this on a VPS over ssh in text mode, and you can't get synaptic running, you can go back to apt-get. If you can run synaptic locally, you can use it to scout the package names. Or, you can use apt-cache search blas | less to search for package descriptions containing the string "blas".