How to install Petite Chez Scheme on Ubuntu?

On recent versions of Ubuntu (and future versions of Debian e.g. "Buster", and other Debian based distros), you can install Chez Scheme directly from the repo(s) by:

sudo apt install chezscheme

Previously you had to install it by compiling from source. Chez Scheme has been open source, for a few years now, and can be compiled from source, if it is not directly installable from the distribution's repo(s). Just download the source code compile and install. This will install not just the "petite" runtime version but also the full compiler. You can compile and install the software with:

./configure
sudo make install

Full build and install instructions are available here.

Pre-requisites for building are:

  • GNU Make
  • GCC
  • Header files and libraries for ncurses
  • Header files and libraries for X windows

On Ubuntu, install the libncurses5-dev package to get libncurses.so. (You can discover this by visiting http://packages.debian.org/file:libncurses.so (sadly, this doesn't seem to work for http://packages.ubuntu.com/file:libncurses.so).)

You may find other linkage errors if Chez requires other libraries to have development packages installed too. Use the same technique as above.


Go directly building from their Github.

ChezScheme

And then just do

./configure
sudo make install

Prerequisites according to Building are:

  • GNU Make
  • gcc
  • Header files and libraries for ncurses
  • Header files and libraries for X windows

And yes in case On Ubuntu, install the libncurses5-dev as Chris stated. Did just that and have no errors shown in clean install.