Installation on Ubuntu Linux is tricky, instructions could be improved

Community Laser Talk
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Hi

I was having trouble getting Lightburn to run on my Linux laptop, I ran “AppRun” from the .7z installer but nothing would happen. After executing it in the command line I got a vague error indicating that a qt5 extension was missing or something (sorry I did not save the terminal output and it is working now)

It took a bit of searching around because most solutions said to simply run sudo apt-get install qt5-default, but apparently this package doesn’t exist, at least not in the Ubuntu 22.04 repos.

I was finally able to solve it with sudo apt install qtbase5-dev qtchooser qt5-qmake qtbase5-dev-tools. That installed the necessary qt packages and I was able to launch LightBurn.

I wanted to share this because the only resource I could find on this form is here which unfortunately devolved into the kind of cattiness one usually sees in the open source world.

It would be good if this info could be put into the installation instructions, because it has steps to solve other common problems, but not this particular problem: Installation & Setup - LightBurn Software Documentation

1 Like
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Thanks for taking the time to post this. It helped me!

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@iboates I hope you’ve noticed that we’re trying to provide AppImage releases from 1.5.00 and forward? The instructions for that are here.

The AppImage should drastically improve your Linux experience, as it bundles all the requirements in a single file, like a self-contained .exe file on Windows has been. There are still minor issues surrounding camera support, but we’re actively working on making those better.