Q:

How to install opencv?

I am trying to learn image processing and obviously opencv is one of the best options. Usually synaptic does all my installing work for me so I just checked the repos. But in the repos there is only on libcv1 and it is listed as 1.0.0-6.2ubuntu1. Does that mean it is version 1.0 of opencv? Also I found this page in community wiki
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenCV
It says I need to install libcv4 which is not in my repos. I also downloaded the source but it uses something called cmake, never used it before. Is it similar to make?

A:

In your case you have indeed version 1.0.0 of the library.
In general when you want to develop using a library, you have to get the corresponding -dev package which contains the header files. In this case libcv-dev. It will also install the library itself, which may have different version numbers depending on the soname - no need to install it separately.
In this case there is also a opencv-doc package, which contains some example programs, and which is worth installing.
If you want to build the library itself from source, you can run sudo apt-get build-dep opencv to get all the required libraries and header files to build opencv. 
Building indeed uses cmake. It is a program which generates makefiles. 

