SWI Prolog on Linux first steps

General
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Great ! Thanks. For now i am testing the swipl install (building it manually way) for a noob under a fresh install of Linux (Pop!OS which is quite a popular friendly Ubuntu fork) … and it seems that following what is written in the swi-prolog documentation doesn’t work :-/

Then you wonder why users have problems with Prolog on Linux … damn

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Building on Linux is typically the least effort as all dependencies are available effortlessly and there is a good out of the box set of build tools. The main problem is getting the right list of dependencies. For Debian derived systems (which includes Ubuntu), these are here. If something doesn’t work as advertised, please point out what is wrong on which page.

For Linux we also have the PPA (Ubuntu only) and Snap which should work on virtually any recent Linux distro.

SWI-Prolog is a system with a lot of features and as a result a lot of dependencies. That causes installations to break frequently as a result of too old or too new dependencies. I don’t think there is a fundamental way to solve this :frowning: Just keep sending reports and fixes …

1 Like
4

For now testing for another use :

  • Pop!OS as it is made by an US integrator having a specific version for NVIDIA stuff
  • Manjaro as it works on rolling cycles
    … both having customer friendly setups.

As for what i tested today, I think that i gonna end up on a Manjaro + GNOME distro.

Then i’ll get back checking SWI-Prolog on it :slight_smile:

EDIT
A quick link to a beginners page about packs on Manjaro as it uses Pamac without snap installed as default:

5

Ok tested on 3 different flavors of distros and ended up testing more on Manjaro + KDE Plasma as i was using it for another project. Frankly Manjaro did what i consider as the best distro to compete in front of Windows, making ArchLinux be user friendly. Moreover for those using swipl-dev it is in the same idea of rolling updates. Engineers will certainly prefer a GNOME or lighter solution but they don’t need help on installation :slight_smile:

For a new comer, it appears to be different SWI Prolog packages at disposal whose name is not always making new users feel confident when you look at the information delivered with the list of packs in between flatpak aur and snap.

To my point of view and in order to be complete as for SWI Prolog installation and better valorize Linux compared to Windows, the download area of swi-prolog would gain having information splitted in between:

  • recompiling
  • command line
  • windowed packet manager
    … and explaining which official or approved packs are really at disposal.

I hope this feed-back will help :slight_smile: