Building Biber on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx)

As I’ve just installed Ubuntu 10.04 (‘Lucid Lynx’) on my test system, I thought I should check that I can get Biber working. As in my earlier posts, this is not too hard, but it’s nice to have some instructions. As usual, first you need to download Biber from the homepage and unpack the files. Using the Terminal, move the directory where the source is and do

sudo cpan Config::AutoConf
perl Build.PL
sudo ./Build installdeps
./Build
./Build test
sudo ./Build install

The cpan line adds one module to Perl which for some reason Biber’s installdeps routine doesn’t find automatically: if you miss this out then the build will fail. There are a lot of Perl questions while the additional modules are installed: I just say yes to all to them. The build itself is pretty quite, and it’s almost at the point of being trivial (the above instructions now seem to work on all the platforms I use).