Ubuntu – error while loading shared libraries: libffi.so.5:

12.04shared librarywunderlist

$ sudo apt-get install libffi6 libffi-dev

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
libffi6 is already the newest version.
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  gir1.2-dbusmenu-gtk-0.4 update-notifier-common gir1.2-gtk-2.0 language-pack-kde-en kde-l10n-engb language-pack-kde-en-base
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libffi-dev
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 255 not upgraded.
Need to get 96.1 kB of archives.
After this operation, 356 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
Get:1 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main libffi-dev amd64 3.0.11~rc1-5 [96.1 kB]
Fetched 96.1 kB in 2s (40.9 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package libffi-dev.
(Reading database ... 221614 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking libffi-dev (from .../libffi-dev_3.0.11~rc1-5_amd64.deb) ...
Processing triggers for doc-base ...
Processing 1 added doc-base file...
Processing triggers for install-info ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up libffi-dev (3.0.11~rc1-5) ...

and then,

:/opt/wunderlist-1.2.4/Wunderlist-1.2.4$ sudo ./Wunderlist   

./Wunderlist: error while loading shared libraries: libffi.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

More info:

$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS \n \l

What am I supposed to do now?

Best Answer

Wunderlist seems to specifically look for an older version of your libffi, it wants libffi5:

libffi.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

You're on 12.04 and the package libffi5 (3.0.9-1) is only available in the lucid repos.

You could add the lucid repos to your /etc/apt/sources.lst and manually install the older package from the lucid repos, creating a mixed system from 12.04 and 10.04. I'd consider this a bad idea, because manually adding very old stuff isn't necessarily leading to a stable system.

Or you could ask the programmer of wunderlist to update their dependencies, perhaps it also works with libffi6.

3rd possible solution, mentioned here (German) Just symlink 6 to 5:

ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libffi.so.6 /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libffi.so.5
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