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I wanted to play a bit Julia, the new language for technical computing, but no binaries were available yet for current versions of Ubuntu. So I decided to try and build them myself by backporting the julia 1.2.0 source package available in Sid and Raring.

On Quantal, the packages were building out of the box. On Precise however, some packages were outdated, and I ended up backporting blas and lapack to slightly newer versions as well. They are now building and installing without problems, although I am not familiar enough yet with Julia to really test every feature in the software.

To give Julia a try on Ubuntu, use:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:opencpu/julia sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install julia

Please get in touch if you experience problems or have tips for improvement.