Skip to content

Install SCALE#

SCALE is currently available as either a .deb package or a tarball for Linux operating systems.

Debian-like Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint)#

First, set up the ROCm 6.0.2 package repository. This is explained by AMD, but briefly:

sudo mkdir --parents --mode=0755 /etc/apt/keyrings
wget https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/rocm.gpg.key -O - | \
    gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/rocm.gpg > /dev/null
echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/rocm.gpg] https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/apt/6.0.2 jammy main" \
    | sudo tee --append /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rocm.list
echo -e 'Package: *\nPin: release o=repo.radeon.com\nPin-Priority: 600' \
    | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/rocm-pin-600
sudo apt update

SCALE can be installed as follows:

# Download the .deb package
# sha512sum: eb74fd4e2588b7d8e029c4433006fa44c7046de531b11fdc69717cca6e24765ec36df490d4be9d0b9e89eac6104482159417856ed3721b2c6720a6eecfc4b27d
wget https://dist.scale-lang.com/scale-free-1.0.2.0-Ubuntu22.04.deb

# Install the package
sudo apt-get install ./scale-free-1.0.2.0-Ubuntu22.04.deb

The /dev/kfd device is writable only to root and members of the render group by default on Ubuntu. Add your user (in this example: youruser) to that group, then log out and log back in:

sudo usermod -a -G render youruser

If, as is the case on Ubuntu 22.04, your kernel is too old, then you'll need to install the kernel driver as well. On Ubuntu 22.04. this can be done as follows:

echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/rocm.gpg] https://repo.radeon.com/amdgpu/6.0.2/ubuntu jammy main" \
    | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/amdgpu.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install amdgpu-dkms g++-12
sudo reboot

Other Linux distros#

There is also a tarball containing binaries for other distributions and that is not tied to a system-wide path.

# Download the tarball
# sha512sum: aec290d52fd3ae1c2aca0e508890a1e7f33ad5a8c624c111771ca2e058c49bdb0f6164189b1e3d1e6b5c79cf251c8c4b22dabd575df197b855ec08cd3c629bcf
wget https://dist.scale-lang.com/scale-free-1.0.2.0-Linux.tar.xz

# Extract the SCALE tarball.
tar xf scale-free-1.0.2.0-Linux.tar.xz

The tarball is significantly larger than the .deb, since it includes many dependent libraries directly instead of asking the system package manager to install them.