Hi ! In this page I write a resume of all technical difficulties encountered when working on algorithmic music. As a musician amateur of coding and science/music interconnections, I could lack a lot of elementary aspect in technological issues. So I am writing a memo here to however is finding similar difficulties.
I was initially trying to white algorithms that generates music code directly integrable in Lilypond.
So I started reading about a Lisp dialect called Scheme. I needed some IDE, the only one I know of is Racket (previously DR. Scheme) and then guile whitch is integrated in Lilypond.
For some reason, Linux Ubuntu Studio repositories did not upgrade Lilypond, Frescobaldi nor Guile.
In the date of writing of this page (2026-05-06) version are :
So maybe I will later learn how to add my own repositories to update them.
After installing guile3.0 form officiel repository
I was trying to compile a code under Ubuntu from Nala Ginrut -> guile-colorized.
I downloaded colorized.scm and make file in the same directory. I just needed to type sudo make install in a terminal. It did not work.
1. Install Dependencies and add the package : guile-3.0-dev
sudo apt update
sudo guile-3.0-dev
Note: guile-colorized requires Guile 2.0.9 or higher.
2. Clone the Repository
Instead of downloading single files, we need the entire repository so the Makefile has access to the necessary build scripts and structure.
cd ~
git clone https://gitlab.com/NalaGinrut/guile-colorized.git
cd guile-colorized
3. Install
Now we can run the installation command as the README suggests: sudo make install .
This will copy the colorized.scm file to the correct Guile module directory (usually ~/.local/share/guile/3.0/ice-9/ or /usr/share/guile/3.0/ice-9/).
4. Configure REPL
To enable the colors, we need to add the following lines to your ~/.guile file. The file doesn't exist, so create and edit* it: sudo nano ~/.guile.
Copy paste the following :
;; Load the colorized module
(use-modules (ice-9 colorized))
(activate-colorized)
If we also want readline support (arrow keys, history), this should be added as well:
(use-modules (ice-9 readline))
(activate-readline)
* : In nano editor save by CTRL-O, return and CTRL-X to return to terminal.
The previous attempt failed because the makefile likely contains commands like mkdir -p $(DESTDIR)$(guile_site_dir)/ice-9 or relies on variables set by make that assume a full repository structure. If you just placed a standalone Makefile in a folder with only colorized.scm, it probably tried to reference a configure script, Makefile.in, or other source files that weren't there, causing the build to fail.
In order to verify if everything is correctly done just type : guile in terminal.