*** nltk

nltk (the Natural Language Toolkit, http://nltk.org/) 
is actively developed and available in the repositories
of Debian and derivatives. To get it up and running 
should require no more than

$> sudo apt-get install python-nltk

(Footnote: At the time of writing (Sep 2013), the port of nltk to python3 is 
well underways, though not finished.
If you have unicode data, as people working in natural language
processing often will, then that release should save you
many headaches.)


*** fn-tbl 

The code of the fn-tbl toolkit (http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~rflorian/fntbl/)
is mostly from around 2000, written for now-obsolete gcc 2.95 and 
gcc 3.0. However, with some small steps, it can be made to compile on a 
modern system. Here is what I had to change to compile with gcc 4.7.3 
on Ubuntu 13.04 64-bit.

0. 
# Download source from
# http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~rflorian/fntbl/,
# unpack it somewhere:

$> tar xvzf fnTBL-1.2.linux.tar.gz

#and cd into the unpacked dir

$> cd fnTBL-1.2


1. 
$> cp src/Makefile src/Makefile.orig

# edit src/Makefile:
# a) line 36, remove obsolete optimization pragma for pentium4
# b) line 63, some warnings have now become fatal errors by default --
#    add -fpermissive which allows for sloppiness of earlier days
#    some other -Wno-X can be added to reduce noise

$> diff src/Makefile.orig src/Makefile
36c36
< ARCHOPTIM = -march=pentium4 #-D__USE_MALLOC
---
> ARCHOPTIM = #-D__USE_MALLOC
63c63
< WARNS = -Wall -Wno-sign-compare
---
> WARNS = -Wall -Wno-sign-compare -Wno-parentheses -Wno-deprecated -Wno-unused-but-set-variable -fpermissive


2. 
$> cp src/fnTBL-train.cc src/fnTBL-train.cc.orig    

# edit src/fnTBL-train.cc:
# a) line 883, change "static_cast<unsigned int>" to 
     "static_cast<unsigned long int>"

$> diff src/fnTBL-train.cc.orig  src/fnTBL-train.cc
883c883
<                            static_cast<unsigned int>(j+PredicateTemplate::MaxForwardLookup));
---
>                            static_cast<unsigned long int>(j+PredicateTemplate::MaxForwardLookup));


3.
$> cp include/trie.h include/trie.h.orig     

# edit include/trie.h: 
# a) after line 70, add "include <cstddef>"

$> diff include/trie.h.orig include/trie.h
70a71
> #include <cstddef>


4. 
#compile should now work
$>make all
     

*** mutbl

Mutbl was written for commercial and now-outdated Sicstus Prolog
3.7.1 in 1999-2000. Its author, Torbjörn Lager, has indicated interest
in reviving the project, and I and maybe others will help. 

The first step is to port it with no loss in functionality to the 
open sourced swipl prolog system. This is substantial work, 
far too long to be described here.

As of October 2013, I have a working (though ugly) version.     
It will turn up on bitbucket.org (or similar), and hopefully
be expanded with post-2000 advancements in TBL technology.



*** brill's original implementation [UNFINISHED SECTION]

Brill's original implementation is now only of historical
value, and it is not clear that the archaeological pleasure 
of running it outweighs the work involved in setting it up.
At present, the following contains mostly notes on possible
strategies.

The best bet to have the code compile on linux is perhaps to
dedicate a discarded 32-bit machine (1995-1998 or so will do)
to an early linux distro such as debian 1.3 or 2.0 from 
1998-1999 http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/.

An alternative strategy is to do the same in a chroot 
environment on a modern system.

targets would be roughly gcc 2.6, libc 1.09.

gcc version history: http://gcc.gnu.org/releases.html
libc version history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_C_Library
debian version history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian