Building arb (ball arithmetic specfun package) on ubuntu with nvcc (for making fractals and phase po

(warning: this is a little out there)

I have an ubuntu system (14.04) with the cuda-6.5 installed. I would like to build Fredrik Johansson’s (http://fredrikj.net/)'s arb (Welcome to Arb’s documentation! — Arb 2.9.0-git documentation) with nvcc because I’m interested in making phase portraits of functions/fractals on the complex plane with speed and arb is likely to have more numerically robust special functions implementations than any other C specfun library.

arb requires
mpir http://www.mpir.org/ (this built with nvcc with no problems)

mpfr: running ./configure with mpfr-3.1.2 fails:
checking limits.h presence… yes
configure: WARNING: limits.h: present but cannot be compiled
configure: WARNING: limits.h: check for missing prerequisite headers?
configure: WARNING: limits.h: see the Autoconf documentation
configure: WARNING: limits.h: section “Present But Cannot Be Compiled”
configure: WARNING: limits.h: proceeding with the compiler’s result
checking for limits.h… no
configure: error: limits.h not found

flint won’t compile without mpfr installed in $PREFIX
and arb won’t compile without all three.