Boost Installation

Question

I have a question regarding the installation of the boost libraries. Is there a package that I can use the sudo apt-get install to install this package. I searched all of the questions in this forum and using the commands sudo apt-get install libboost1.40-dev I cannot install theh package with this. Also, I can download it from boost.org but I do not know the correct path to install it too. I would prefer to install it using the sudo apt-get install commands if possible. I am using Ubuntu 9.04. Thanks.

Solution 1

You can use command aptitude search libboost to see list of the availiable boost libraries. The last version of boost is 1.42 - maybe that's why you can't find version 1.40.

If aptitude search command don't give you sufficient results, try sudo aptitude update and then run aptitude search again.

Solution 2

If you want to run with the latest version, you can do the bjam install as mentioned by Ralf, but I suggest you build a 'pseudo' package so you can

• uninstall it safely
• prevent/notice conflicts with official/existing boost packages.

Here is how to do that:

mkdir -pv /tmp/boostinst
cd /tmp/boostinst/
wget -c 'http://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost/1.66.0/boost_1_66_0.tar.bz2/download'
tar xf download
cd boost_1_66_0/
./bootstrap.sh --help
./bootstrap.sh --show-libraries
./bootstrap.sh 

checkinstall ./b2 install

Solution 3

On new boost version there is other way:

sudo apt-get update
wget -c 'http://sourceforge.net/projects/boost/files/boost/1.50.0/boost_1_50_0.tar.bz2/download'
tar xf download
cd boost_1_50_0
./bootstrap.sh
./b2 install

Solution 4

On my version of Ubuntu (10.04) it's libboost1.40-all-dev

On your version you've probably got an older version of boost, you should just be able to tab-complete to see which version you can install.

In any case what I usually do under Ubuntu is

sudo apt-get install bjam

Extract the downloaded boost archive to your hard-drive and then cd into the root and

sudo bjam install

This way you can get the newest version of boost, and not the slightly outdated one that is available for your Ubuntu version.

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Comments

[tpar44]

I can't get bjam...when I type sudo apt-get bjam it says that bjam is an invalid operation

[Ralf]

Oops, omitted "install", fixed it :)

[sehe]

Heads up: bjam got renamed to b2` for purposes of building boost with boost v.1_48

[nurettin]

sudo checkinstall ./b2 install worked after installing libbz2-dev

[Farshid Rayhan]

how can I verify if the boost is correctly installed ?

[kyb]

plus 1 for checkinstall