Asdf-erlang: Erlang installation gets stuck on building kerl on new Ubuntu EC2 instance

[jayprado]

I can't seem to finish the installation of erlang 20.1 through asdf on a new Ubuntu 16.04 EC2 instance on AWS. On a newly launched instance, I run apt-get update & apt-get upgrade before I install asdf along with the dependencies listed under the Ubuntu entry here.

The installation always end up getting stuck on the part where it says Using fakefop to generate placeholder PDF files.

I have tried installing a Java compiler but it made no difference.

I also tried installing erlang using kerl (and not asdf) but it gets stuck on the same place.

I am very new to all of these so any help would be very much appreciated.

[Stratus3D]

Were you using the latest version of asdf-erlang? We recently made some changes to the way documentation is built and installed. Latest on the master branch shouldn't install any docs unless you tell it to.

[jayprado]

Hi @Stratus3D, yes. I installed asdf-erlang using asdf plugin-add erlang https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf-erlang.git, which I assume installs the latest version.

[Stratus3D]

For good measure runasdf plugin-update erlang and see if it pulls down any new changes.

I use Ubuntu on my laptop and I have not had any trouble recently. When it gets stuck is that message all you see? And does it just hang or does it crash?

[jayprado]

@Stratus3D It says it's already the latest version. Still gets stuck on this part. Wonder what could be the cause?

[joxford531]

Seeing the same issue on my EC2 instance using the AMI Amazon Linux AMI 2016.09.1.20161221 x86_64 HVM GP2. I left it running for about 10 minutes but it still never gets past Using fakefop to generate placeholder PDF files

After leaving my computer for an hour I came back to see that it had finally installed. @jayprado You may have to wait for a while to see if it eventually finishes.

[Stratus3D]

No idea. It's probably something specific to AWS. Maybe related to http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2015-August/085400.html?

[lpil]

What's the CPU usage? I thought my build was stuck at this point but it seems it is compiling, just it prints nothing during this process.

[tuvokki]

Because of the exact same issue I arrived here and installed the latest version of the plugin.

I did the following on Ubuntu 16.04 (with all relevant packages^*1 installed):

asdf plugin-remove erlang
asdf plugin-add erlang https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf-erlang.git
asdf plugin-update erlang
asdf install erlang 21.1

It took pretty long (about 15 minutes) but it worked ok.

_{*1: build-essential autoconf m4 libncurses5-dev libwxgtk3.0-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libpng3 libssh-dev libssh-dev libssh-dev fop libxml2-utils}

[x-ji]

Seems to have the same situation under a DigitalOcean Ubuntu VM. It actually finished in the end but it just took very long.

[Stratus3D]

I'm going to close this since I don't think this is an issue with asdf-erlang. Erlang compilation takes time. I don't think it's ever taken less than 10 minutes for me on top of the line hardware. I can imagine it taking an hour or more on VM a sharing a CPU with other VMs.