Thank you Matt, that fixed my problem on Ubuntu. I tried to install on Fedora, and I got a different error.

The error on Fedora is:
checking if unsupported combinations of configure options are allowed... no
checking if Fortran interface enabled... no
checking whether we are using the GNU C++ compiler... no
checking whether g++ accepts -g... no
checking dependency style of g++... none
checking how to run the C++ preprocessor... /lib/cpp
configure: error: in `/home/ariel/yt-x86_64/src/hdf5-1.8.7':
configure: error: C++ preprocessor "/lib/cpp" fails sanity check