Installing with apt-get on Linux Mint 21

Question

Hi,

Completely new to Cadabra. My system is Linux Mint 21 which is an offshoot of Ubuntu.

Installing by doing:

apt-get install cadabra

appeared to work. Cadabra is now in the main menu under Education. I appear to have version: 1.46

Most things I try don't work. For example trying to load any of the example notebooks gives:

Not in Cadabra notebook version <= 1.2 format.

So I guess the first question is, can I actually install it this way or do I need to download and build it. And should I expect v 1.46 to work with the exampes and example notebooks.

Many thanks,

Mike

Answer 1

You installed the old 1.x series. The package for the new series (since about 2016) is called cadabra2. You'll need a fairly recent Mint for that though. The alternative is to download a package from the downloads page at https://cadabra.science/download.html .

Comments

Ok, thanks. There is a cadabra2 available via apt-get, but it doesn't appear to work. It's described as: Cadabra 2.3.6 (build private dated 2022-01-31). AFAICT it can't find python where it expects to see it and then crashes.

I'll go ahead and try cadabra2-2.4.0-ulyana.deb from the Mint Ulyana 20 link on the download page, unless you would suggest something different.

For what it's worth, the python I'm using came from the repo.anaconda.com archive. I've currently got Python 3.8.5 and it's in /usr/local/anaconda3/bin/python, just in case there's some dependency there.

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You cannot mix and match python versions from your normal installation and anaconda, that is bound to lead to trouble somewhere. Conda is a truly horrible package manager that has caused a lot of trouble by trying to override everything of a normal installation. If you insist on using conda's python, then in order to stay out of trouble you have to install cadabra2 using conda as well. Be aware that you may not always have the latest version in that case, as I am not in control of the conda package for cadabra.

On Debian/Ubuntu, by far the cleanest route is to stick to the system-provided python, and install one of the cadabra packages from the download page. There isn't one for Mint 21 yet, but I will put that on my todo list.