How to compile SRILM (srilm-1.7.1) on the RPi2B (Rasbian-Whizzy/Jessie)

Although SRILM Toolkit is in C++, the compilation of SRILM requires knowledge of the type of machine which is to define certain variables pointing to necessary libraries. To do this, it provides a script srilm-1.7.1/sbin/machine-type that returns the type of machine from the output of the command uname -a. The script has an internal list of machine type, which is used to define some variables or other. As expected, the machine type armv7l is not listed, so this script gave an error. To solve this, it is necessary to modify the script srilm-1.7.1/sbin/machine-type so that it will return a correct machine type (in our case, armv7l). To do this, simply include machine type armv7l in the uname -m case statement as follows:

case "`uname -m`" in
armv7l) MACHINE_TYPE=armv7l

Once this is done, you need to create a file srilm-1.7.1/common/Makefile.machine.armv7l for new machine type armv7l. The easiest way to do this is to copy the file srilm-1.7.1/common/Makefile.machine.i686

cd ~/srilm-1.7.1/common
cp Makefile.machine.i686 Makefile.machine.armv7l

And delete all the flags of the line GCC_FLAGS not begin with -W. After the changes, line will looks like as follows:

GCC_FLAGS=-Wall -Wno-unused-variable -Wno-uninitialized

Once this is done, define variables,MACHINE_TYPE and SRILM, and add them to PATH and MANPATH variable as follows:

sudo nano ~/.bashrc
export SRILM=~/srilm-1.7.1
export MACHINE_TYPE=armv7l
export PATH=$PATH:$SRILM/bin/$MACHINE_TYPE:$SRILM/bin
export MANPATH=$MANPATH:$SRILM/man

If TCL is not installed then install it as follows:

sudo apt-get install tcl-dev

Insert path to tcl.h (e.g. -I/usr/include/tcl8.5) to TCL_INCLUDE in common/Makefile.machine.armv7l

# Tcl support (standard in Linux)
TCL_INCLUDE = -I/usr/include/tcl8.5
TCL_LIBRARY = -ltcl

The following command will compile SRILM and verify the installation.

cd ~/srilm-1.7.1
make World
make test

License: To install, you will also need a copy of the SRILM Toolkit(http://www.speech.sri.com/projects/srilm/), for which you will need a license from SRI.