Hi Dave,
Yes, for many of the newer "free" Linux systems, /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu is the location of the libraries.
Are you building Ferret or PyFerret? We recommend the latter. Also, if you are going to build from source, get the latest source (7.4.3) from GitHub:
The RHEL7 pre-built package might work, but I have not tested it on Ubuntu.
If you are building it, and if the
site_specific.mk file specifies *_LIBDIR environment variables as in the latest versions, the "platform_specific.mk.*" files assume the include directories are in sibling subdirectories to the library directories - thus "../include" relative to the library subdirectory. (Older version specifies the parent directory and assume an "include" and "lib" or "lib64" subdirectory.) If this is not the case, the appropriate platform_specific.mk.* file will need to be tweaked to give the proper path to the include files.
Note that if you are using system libraries, you should just use the NetCDF shared object library - thus only specify NETCDF_LIBDIR and leave all the other locations blank. The NetCDF location needs to be specified to find the include files, although since those are in a standard location, that probably isn't actually required as long as the development (usually something like "netcdf-devel") system package is installed.
There is also an Anaconda package for PyFerret, but being a sys admin I assume you would rather hav
b/x86_64-linux-gnu/libhdf5_serial_hl.so.10
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libhdf5_serialhl_fortran.so.10.0.2
Blush. I am the system administrator. But I don't know a thing about ferret, netcdf, etc. I always use packages, almost never compile anything.