Why does the Boost.Python example build fail?

Question

I am extremely frustrated right now, please help me with this:

After downloading Boost1.55 and unpacking it on a Linux12.04LTS installation, I was able to build it with $ bootstrap.sh and $ ./b2. No errors occurred, so I assume everything went right.

Now, as explained in this tutorial, I invoked $ bjam in the boost_1_55_0/libs/python/example/tutorial directory, but it doesn't seem to work. I get warnings about mismatching versions of boost and bjam and the file "link.jam" is supposedly missing. Also, the tutorial mentions a user-config.jam file in my home-directory which doesn't exist anywhere on my system.

I've found other questions regarding this on SO, but most of them talk about problems when the build was already finished, or had much lengthier error-outputs. The few that were similar to my problem found solutions that didn't work for me.

What am I doing wrong?

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Output of $ bjam invocation:

felix@felix-Ubuntu-VBox:~/boost_1_55_0/libs/python/example/quickstart$ bjam
warning: mismatched versions of Boost.Build engine and core
warning: Boost.Build engine (bjam) is 03.1.19
warning: Boost.Build core (at /home/felix/boost_1_55_0/tools/build/v2) is 2011.12-svn
link.jam: No such file or directory
/home/felix/boost_1_55_0/tools/build/v2/util/path.jam:458: in path.makedirs
rule MAKEDIR unknown in module path.
/home/felix/boost_1_55_0/tools/build/v2/build/configure.jam:233: in configure.set-log-file
/home/felix/boost_1_55_0/tools/build/v2/build-system.jam:695: in load
/home/felix/boost_1_55_0/libs/python/example/quickstart/../../../../tools/build/v2/kernel/modules.jam:289: in import
/home/felix/boost_1_55_0/libs/python/example/quickstart/../../../../tools/build/v2/kernel/bootstrap.jam:139: in boost-build
/home/felix/boost_1_55_0/libs/python/example/quickstart/boost-build.jam:7: in module scope

Answer 1

In the directory boost_1_55_0/libs/python/example/ I used the 1_55 version of bjam you just built while building boost:

../../../b2 

This worked out of the box on my (identical) system If you are missing dependencies, the "lazy" way to get them is usually

sudo apt-get build-dep libboost-all-dev 

which instructs the package manager to prepare all the build dependencies as if you were going to compile the distribution packaged version of boost. Most often the requirements haven't changed dramatically since the version packaged with your distribution.