I want to use the latest MeshLab from source because of an annoying bug which makes it impossible to use MeshLab with any locale setting where "," is used instead of "." as decimal separator. Like my German one.
I mainly followed this extensive HowTo: http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Compiling_devel#Getting_the_sources and I used this advise: http://byeworld.blogspot.com/2009/01/libf2cso-undefined-reference-to-main.html
Here you find the most important steps in a short instruction set.
$ sudo apt-get install qt4-qmake libqt4-dev build-essential lib3ds-dev
libbz2-dev liblapack-dev libf2c2-dev libmuparser-dev
$ cd MyWorkFolder
$ svn co
https://meshlab.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/meshlab/trunk/meshlab
meshlab
$ svn co
https://vcg.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vcg/trunk/vcglib vcglib
$ wget http://www.ics.forth.gr/~lourakis/levmar/levmar-2.5.tgz
$ tar -xzf levmar-2.5.tgz
$ cd levmar-2.5/
$ sudo rm /usr/lib/libf2c.so && sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libf2c.a
/usr/lib/libf2c.so
$ make
$ mkdir ../meshlab/src/external/lib/linux-g++
$ cd ../meshlab/src/external/lib/linux-g++
$ ln -s ../../../../../levmar-2.5/liblevmar.a liblevmar.a
$ ln -s /usr/lib/lib3ds.a lib3ds.a
$ ln -s /usr/lib/libbz2.a libbz2.a
$ ln -s /usr/lib/libmuparser.so libmuparser.a
$ cd ../../..
$ qmake -recursive meshlabv12.pro
$ make
Now create a little shell script e.g. meshlab.sh and adjust your paths:
#!/bin/bash
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/home/jan/workspace/meshlab/meshlab/src/distrib
LC_ALL="C" MALLOC_CHECK_=2 /home/jan/workspace/meshlab/meshlab/src/distrib/meshlab "$@"
Make it executable and enjoy
$ chmod +x meshlab.sh
$ ./meshlab.sh
