I am not sure. I do not use that tutorial.
Here are the steps I use on my BeagleBone Black. I only have a root account. I build Earthworm in /opt/earthworm. That is where I keep the source and binaries. I use /home/earthworm to run Earthworm. When I do the svn download, I note the version (rev) number. That is what I use to set the EW_REV variable.
You should follow the tutorial to install the compilers and subversion that you will need, including gfortran. The Debian wheezy I use came with gcc installed. I only had to install gfortran and subversion, as I recall.
Download the latest Earthworm SVN sources and create a tar file snapshot
# cd /opt/earthworm
# rm -f -r earthworm-svn
# EW_REV=rev
# rm -f -r earthworm-7.10-${EW_REV}
# svn export -r ${EW_REV} earthworm-svn earthworm-7.10-${EW_REV}
# tar -cjf earthworm-7.10-${EW_REV}-src.tar.bz2 earthworm-7.10-${EW_REV}
The next two lines are only when you want to start over from the tar file snapshot
# rm -r earthworm-7.10-${EW_REV}
# tar -xjf earthworm-7.10-${EW_REV}-src.tar.bz2
Build the Earthworm binaries from the tar file snapshot
# EW_INSTALL_HOME="`pwd`" \
EW_INSTALL_VERSION=earthworm-7.10-${EW_REV} \
source earthworm-7.10-${EW_REV}/environment/ew_linux_arm.bash
# cd earthworm-7.10-${EW_REV}/src
# make clean_unix
# make clean_bin_unix
# make unix &>../../make-linux-arm-${EW_BITS}.log
Look for errors (there should not be any)
# tail ../../make-linux-arm-${EW_BITS}.log
# grep -i ': err' ../../make-linux-arm-${EW_BITS}.log
# grep '[*][*][*]' ../../make-linux-arm-${EW_BITS}.log
The binaries are in /opt/earthworm/earthworm-7.10-${EW_REV}/bin