This is documentation for installing MB-System-r2279 on Ubuntu 14.04 as of Nov 2016. Although documentation for mb-system has improved dramatically over the past few years, it can still be difficult. In particular, I have not found step 1.4 in the documentation and missing this step will result in being unable to use gmt shared libraries such as "gmt mbcontour" which is necessary for producing contour lines in maps.
##1) Install GMT 5.1.2 I am using directions from Andrew at: http://andrewjmoodie.com/2014/12/installing-the-generic-mapping-tools-5-gmt-5-1-x-on-ubuntu-linux/ I've added step 1.4 to get this to load shared libraries from mb-system.
##1.1) Install relvent dependencies