Problem building Festival (Text to Speech) on Ubuntu

Question

I set up a Ubuntu VM today just to build Festival on Ubuntu (I never ran it before) Then I did the following setups

1. On the Terminal window I wrote following to install GNU C++ Compiler

   sudo apt-get install build-essential
   

2. To test the g++ I wrote a sample hello world and compiled it using g++ and run it and it worked as expected.

3. I downloaded all the files from listed on festival download page

4. Unpacked all to the home directory(~) using

   tar -zxvf *.tar.gz
   

5. Then wrote following 3 commands to configure and make speech_tools

   cd speech_tools
   
   ./configure
   
   make
   

But make returns with following errors

/lib -leststring -lcurses -ldl -lncurses -lm -lstdc++ -lgcc
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lcurses
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lncurses
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [ch_lab] Error 1
make: *** [main] Error 2

What am I missing? being a newbie to Ubuntu or any other Unix platform I may missed some important configuration, before that I have successfully built festival on my windows machine using Cygwin.

Answer 1

You probably need to install the development packages for libncurses. Try

sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev