In case anyone is going to try to answer eventually: 

I solved some of the problem when I installed again on a NeuroDebian virtual machine instead of Ubuntu, but it still doesn't work. Now I get this error: 

vtk: error while loading shared libraries: libhistory.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I know the installation instructions advise to add a link from /lib/libhistory.so.5 to /lib/libhistory.so.6, but neither of them seem to exist on my machine.