SimGrid requires Lua 5.3; it will not work with Lua 5.2 or Lua 5.1, as Lua 5.3 breaks backwards compatibility. However, installing Lua 5.3 is easy. (If you're an administrator) Step 1: Go to http://www.lua.org/download.html and download the 5.3 package. Step 2: Untar the package: tar xvfz lua-5.3.*.tar.gz Step 3: cd into the new directory Step 4: Apply the patch in "/contrib/lua/lualib.patch" to the lua source: For instance, if you unpacked the lua sourcecode to /tmp/lua-5.3.1, use the following commands: cp contrib/lua/lualib.patch /tmp/lua-5.3.1 cd /tmp/lua-5.3.1/ patch -p1 < lualib.patch Step 5: make , for instance "make linux" Step 6: sudo make install Step 7: Run ccmake (or supply the config option to cmake) to enable Lua in SimGrid. Done!