So it appears scons was the culprit for me. I guess reinstalling it from source
didn't do both halves. I had to unmerge scons, erase all scons files, then
install it again from source, and that gave me 0.95 for both lines of output
from scons --v.

This built csound5 with and without CsoundVST, with no changes necessary to
SConstruct other than the tags and make dynamic, and no changes necessary to
custom.py. So I guess it would be nice if ( as John said ) the defaults were no
tags and dynamic on Linux for people like me who don't know what the error
messages mean. ; ) 

However, attempting to run an example code failed with "no legal opcode" for
both vco and moogvcf. Is there some new ranygazoo I don't know about for loading
up all the opcodes, or are these ones just not working yet? 

At any rate I will be happy to test in whatever manner is helpful. Thanks so
much for the patient instructions.

Iain

Glad you got somewhere !

Are you picking up the plugins?  It looks in $OPCODEDIR and current 
directory for the .so files to load.  

I copy the .so files into a Plugin directory and have
setenv OPCODEDIR ~/Sourceforge/csound5/Plugins
If you use bash you would need something like 
OPCODEDIR=~/Sourceforge/csound5/Plugins; export OPCODEDIR
(not a system I use...)

==John f

I have changed the build so TAGS is off by default.
==John ff

dynamic is already set for linux without comment here

John ffitch wrote:

>Glad you got somewhere !
>
>Are you picking up the plugins?  It looks in $OPCODEDIR and current 
>directory for the .so files to load.  
>
>I copy the .so files into a Plugin directory and have
>setenv OPCODEDIR ~/Sourceforge/csound5/Plugins
>If you use bash you would need something like 
>OPCODEDIR=~/Sourceforge/csound5/Plugins; export OPCODEDIR
>(not a system I use...)
>  
>
is there a plan to make some kind of 'make install' option that puts 
these files in a
standardized directory and obviates the need for an environment 
variable?   might be handy.
you can also set LD_LIBRARY_PATH, as per the instructions for csoundvst 
in csound.pdf, btw-- or at least that worked for me.

glyn