However unelegant it may seem, this is currently the easiest way to get SWI-Prolog and JPL up and running on a Debian-based distribution. You can either download and convert the RPM yourself, or grab the ready DEB package.

• download http://gollem.science.uva.nl/cgi-bin/nph-download/SWI-Prolog/binaries/pl-5.6.54-319.i586.rpm
• sudo apt-get install alien
• sudo alien -d pl-5.6.54-319.i586.rpm, doesn't work with SWI Prolog 5.6.60 cpio/extraction error
• satisfy the dependencies
• sudo dpkg -i pl_5.6.54-319_i386.deb

Get it here: 5.6.54

There indeed seems to be an issue with post-5.6.54 RPMs. The alien command uses the following commands to extract a RPM file (intentionally broken into two commands with intermediate file):

• rpm2cpio file.rpm > file.cpio (to convert from rpm to cpio)
• cat file.cpio | cpio –extract –make-directories –no-absolute-filenames –preserve-modification-time (to extract the cpio file)

It seems that the Ubuntu rpm2cpio version can't handle the new RPM files properly – we're currently investigating this issue. More about CPIO can be found here.