howto: install ARB in Ubuntu Feisty

Make sure you have the prerequisites (most notably, in Feisty, the libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 package, which I had to do some digging to figure out):

• transfig
• xfig
• xviewg
• gv
• libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 (in the universe repository)

Download the latest ARB for linux at www.arb-home.de.  The download directory contains three files; you need to put all of them in the same place: arb_install.sh, arb.tgz and zcat. No need to untar anything.

In the directory where you put these downloads,

$ sudo sh arb_install.sh

The script asks a bunch of installation questions, and it’s pretty self-explanatory about what it’s asking, so go nuts.  I used all the defaults for a stand-alone computer, except I used /opt/arb as the install directory instead of /usr/arb.

When the script exits, it mentions editing something in /etc (but it doesn’t say what).  In Feisty, you need to add the following lines to the /etc/bash.bashrc file (assuming you used /opt/arb as the installation directory like me–otherwise, you may have to replace “opt” below with “usr”):

ARBHOME=/opt/arb;export ARBHOME
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${ARBHOME}/lib:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
PATH=${ARBHOME}/bin:${PATH}
export PATH
alias arb=/opt/arb/bin/arb
echo “This shell is ARB-enabled.”  #Not necessary.  Just for fun.

It now seems to work!  You can delete the installation files.  Or, you can change your current installation by running arb_install.sh again.