Installing Libboost 1.38 on Ubuntu 8.10

Question

Is there a way to Install Libboost 1.38 on Ubuntu 8.10? The highest version in my repositories is 1.35. It has been suggested that there may be some repositories I could add to accomplish this, but my searches haven't yielded anything.

Do I have to resort to source code? If so, what is the best way to accomplish this?

Thanks

Answer 1

libboost1.37-dev is in the Jaunty repository.

If you must have Boost 1.38, you'll have to compile it from sources yourself.

Answer 2

You can either

• Upgrade to Jaunty (Ubuntu 9.04) which has 1.37. You can even incrementally upgrade to just its boost libraries (google for apt-pinning)
• use a more advanced method I often use: download the Debian package sources from Debian unstable (currently 1.38 with 1.39 in the NEW queue and available "real soon now") and rebuild those locally. You may want to google Debian package building -- and rest assured it is easy as the work has been done, you are merely building local variants from existing sources. This way you stay inside the package management system and are forward-compatible with upgrades
• if everything else fails, build from source.

Answer 3

On Ubuntu, installing from source is straightforward. Get source, unpack, and run these commands:

./bootstrap.sh --prefix=/usr/local --libdir=/usr/local/lib
./bjam --layout=system install

Alternatively, you may wish to grab SVN HEAD, or wait for upcoming 1.40. Then, you can drop all of the above options except for install. You may want to review release notes at http://beta.boost.org to see if upcoming changes are "risky" for your case.