I have been building from source fairly often on my Linux Mint 18.1 (essentially Ubuntu 16.04) machine. The
installation procedure here
has been working very well for me. This procedure pulls the latest source code from the git repository at
Sourceforge
. I haven't tried installing the nightly builds, but I think the Ubuntu installation instructions
here
should work. It mentions:
Every time you upgrade your packages using sudo apt-get upgrade, NGSolve will be upgraded too.
You can also install the nightly build by installing the package ngsolve_nightly.
I believe the main code repository is a private GitLab site which is accessible only to the core developers. Normally, when a developer makes a commit to the master branch of the primary repository, it appears at the Sourceforge site within a few hours (that's what I meant by the upstream process).
But no new commits have appeared at the Sourceforge site in the past 11 days. In my experience, that is an unusually long time, since the application is actively being developed. I'm not sure whether the delay in pushing commits to Sourceforge is intentional on the part of the core team or if perhaps some automated process has broken, preventing that synchronization. I'm not sure if the nightly builds are based on the code at Sourceforge or at the primary repository.
I think it may be possible that the fix for exporting from the command line mentioned by joachim (Dr. Schoeberl) may not have made it to the Sourceforge repository, hence why it is still not working for you.
Best,
Dow Drake