I've upgraded from Ubuntu 9.4 (?) to 10.4 and polymake stopped working. So I downloaded and rebuilt from source. I'm now getting (for both 2.8 and 2.9):
$ cat temp.polymake.pl
new Polytope<Rational>;
$ polymake --version
polymake version 2.9.8, released on March 03, 2010
Copyright (c) 1997-2010
Ewgenij Gawrilow, Michael Joswig (TU Darmstadt)
http://www.polymake.de
$ polymake --script temp.polymake.pl
polymake: ERROR: "/path/to/file/temp.polymake.pl", line 1: Package "Polytope" does not exist
I'm now going to try 2.7.
Jonathan