Recently I attempted to install the Algorithm::SVMLight perl module via CPAN onto my Ubuntu box. It did not go well. I discovered that the CPAN package doesn’t include half of what you need, and I could not find any directions anywhere about how to get it to work. That compounded with svm-light’s lack of commenting made for a fun evening.

I’m posting my experience and solution here so maybe someone else who has the same problem can use it and not have to pull their hair out like I did.

First off.. forget about installing via CPAN. We're doing this manually. Here's what I had to do:

1. Download Algorithm::SVMLight to its own directory:

2. Download svmlight into that directory:

3. Algorithm-SVMLight-0.08 includes a patch file SVMLight.patch that you need to apply:

4. Now we need to build and install svmlight, and then create a shared library that Algorithm::SVMLight links into:

4.1. Open Makefile in an editor (eg. nano, pico, vi, gedit, whatever) and replace "CFLAGS= -O3" with "CFLAGS= -O3 -fPIC"

5. Put this library somewhere Algorithm::SVMLight can find it (you need to be root to do this):
- or -

6. Before we can build Algorithm::SVMLight, we need to add a couple header files:

7. Now Algorithm::SVMLight should build and install:
(Note: on Debian I needed to apt-get libmodule-build-perl first.)

I think I've remembered everything correctly. With any amount of luck this should work. If not, send me an email and I'll try to help you out.