HDF5 library not found on Linux

[ethanbb]

This is probably something you're aware of, but when following the current instructions for installing HDF5 on Linux, CMake can't find the library.

I get the error:

-- Could NOT find HDF5: Found unsuitable version "", but required is exact version "1.8" (found HDF5_LIBRARIES-NOTFOUND;HDF5_CXX_LIBRARIES-NOTFOUND;HDF5_hdf5_cpp_LIBRARY-NOTFOUND;HDF5_hdf5_LIBRARY-NOTFOUND)

I also tried building HDF5 with CMake using the instructions here, and got to extracting the output into /usr/local and setting the HDF5_DIR environment variable, but I ended up with the same error.

I'm not sure whether this means the library was not found at all, or that it just doesn't have version information. It looks like there isn't a version specified when calling target_link_libraries in the CMake examples from HDF5, so maybe the library just doesn't support requesting a specific version.

In any case, I can't really spend more time on this, but someone should find and document a working installation method on Linux.

Edit: This is on Ubuntu version 18.04.2.

[aacuevas]

You should not need to build hdf5 in any specific way, apart from what is written on the Linux installation page. But I will test with a ubuntu18 machine (my usual test machine is on 16) and check that there is no weird path thing going on.

[medengineer]

Updating this issue as we now have GitHub Actions setup to run automated builds on clean installs of both Ubuntu 16 and 18. Defining the LD_LIBRARY_PATH after running cmake on the HDF5Plugins results in proper loading of the plugins in the GUI:

`export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/hdf5/lib:<PLUGIN_GUI_PATH>/Build/shared/OpenEphysHDF5Lib.so