pandoc on Ubuntu can't use beamer

Question

I'm using pandoc to author slides. I'd like to see how the beamer PDF output looks, but I'm getting an error:

$ pandoc -t beamer talk.txt -o talk.pdf
pandoc: Unknown writer: beamer

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Answered my own question. beamer support was added in pandoc 1.9 (2012-02-05), but my Ubuntu 11.10 desktop has pandoc 1.8.1.1.

I updated pandoc as follows:

sudo apt-get autoremove pandoc
sudo apt-get install cabal-install
cabal update
cabal install pandoc

Notice the last two commands do not use sudo.