Errors due to vowpal wabbit's dependencies on boost library - machine-learning

Question

I'm trying real hard to install vowpal wobbit and it fails when i run the make file, throwing:
cd library; make; cd ..
g++ -g -o ezexample temp2.cc -L ../vowpalwabbit -l vw -l allreduce -l boost_program_options -l z -l pthread
ld: library not found for -lboost_program_options collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make[1]: *** [ezexample] Error 1'
I then added the links to the boost library here by specifying -L/usr/local/lib
Now I get the following error:
g++ -g -o ezexample temp2.cc -L/usr/local/lib ../vowpalwabbit -l vw -l allreduce -l boost_program_options -l z -l pthread
ld: library not found for -lvw
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [ezexample] Error 1

Answer 1

I happened to get everything working on OS X 10.7 as follows:
Make sure you have a working Boost installation. As indicated on the Getting started page, usually we only need header files, but some Boost libraries must be built separately, including the program_options library which is used to process options from command line or config file. Go into your boost folder, and then at your shell prompt:
$ ./bootstrap.sh
$ ./bjam
This will compile and build everything. You should now have a bin.v2/ directory in your boost directory, with all built libraries for your system (static and threaded libs).
$ ls bin.v2/libs/
date_time iostreams python serialization test
filesystem math random signals thread
graph program_options regex system wave
More importantly, extra Boost libraries are made available in the stage/lib/ directory. For me, these are Mach-O 64-bit dynamically linked shared library x86_64.
The include path should be your_install_dir/boost_x_xx_x, where boost_x_xx_x is the basename of your working Boost. (I personally have boost_1_46_1 in /usr/local/share/ and I symlinked it to /usr/local/share/boost to avoid having to remember version number.) The library path (for linking) should read your_install_dir/boost_x_xx_x/stage/lib. However, it might be best to symlink or copy (which is what I did) everything in usual place, i.e. /usr/local/include/boost for header files, and /usr/local/lib for libraries.
Edit the Makefile from the vowpal_wabbit directory, and change the include/library paths to reflect your current installation. The Makefile should look like this (first 12 lines):
COMPILER = g++
UNAME := $(shell uname)
ifeq ($(UNAME), FreeBSD)
LIBS = -l boost_program_options -l pthread -l z -l compat
BOOST_INCLUDE = /usr/local/include
BOOST_LIBRARY = /usr/local/lib
else
LIBS = -l boost_program_options -l pthread -l z
BOOST_INCLUDE = /usr/local/share/boost # change path to reflect yours
BOOST_LIBRARY = /usr/local/share/boost/stage/lib # idem
endif
Then, you are ready to compile vowpal_wabbit (make clean in case you already compiled it):
$ make
$ ./vw --version
6.1
$ make test

Answer 2

You can also install vowpal wabbit on OS X using brew:
brew install vowpal-wabbit
Or you can just install boost, and then install vw from the github repo.
brew install boost

Answer 3

For installation on CentOS 7 (6.5 perl version is too old for latest vw source code), I've found the instructions at http://wkoplitz.blogspot.be/2012/12/vowpal-wabbit-on-centos.html to work fine:
yum install zlib-devel boost-devel
yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
git clone git://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit.git
cd vowpal_wabbit
./autogen.sh
make
make test

Answer 4

Good news:
As of the latest release VowpalWabbit version 9.1.0, vw no longer relies on Boost program_options
From the release highlights:
Removal of Boost Program Options dependency
For a long time we have depended on Boost Program Options
for command line options parsing. In this release, we have > replaced this dependency with our own implementation of
command line parsing. Apart from one place where we depend > on Boost Math in standalone mode, this means that VW core
and the command line tool are free of Boost dependencies
hopefully making the code a bit easier to build and package.
Vowpal Wabbit 9.1.0 release notes