Installing Cadsoft Eagle 6 on Ubuntu 10.4

Update (19 Dec 2014): Just reviewing old blog posts. This article is now way out of date. Please ignore.

Update (5 Mar 2012): I've just been informed that libpng-1.4.8 has been replaced by libpng-1.4.9 and removed from ftp.simplesystems.org. I'll update the script in the next few days. In the mean time, please edit the script to change the version of libpng.

The recently released Eagle 6 from Cadsoft has a dependency on libpng 1.4, libjpeg 8, libcrypt 1.0, libssl 1.0. My Ubuntu 10.4 distribution has older versions of these libraries which Eagle 6 does not like.

There are a few posts on how to fix this, eg this one. However it relies on some helpful person's pre-built binaries. While I'm sure it's perfectly good, I'm just a little too paranoid to copy and execute code from an unknown source. So I set about downloading and building these libraries from source. I've written up the procedure as a bash script in case someone as paranoid as myself would like to do the same.

This script will build these libraries from source, and copy them to a directory specifically for use with Eagle.

This is the procedure:

1. First create an empty directory. Copy this script into it. Next open the script with an editor.
2. Set EAGLE_DEPS_DIR to a location where you want the libraries to be copied to after building (eg /home/joe/libeagle in my case)
3. I recommend that you verify the download locations of the library sources before you run this script. This is security best practice: it's generally not a good idea to download and execute code from an untrusted source. Once you are happy with the download URLs, then set I_HAVE_VERIFIED_DOWNLOAD_LOCATIONS=true
4. Save and run the script. If it's your first time running it, it will download the sources. Subsequent runs wont waste bandwidth if they are already there. Building the libraries will take a few minutes.
5. Verify the contents of the directory defined in EAGLE_DEPS_DIR. It should have the following files:
   • libcrypto.so.1.0.0
   • libjpeg.so.8.3.0
   • libpng14.so.14.8.0
   • libssl.so.1.0.0
   and these symbolic links:
   • libjpeg.so.8 -> /home/joe/libeagle/libjpeg.so.8.3.0
   • libpng14.so.14 -> /home/joe/libeagle/libpng14.so.14.8.0
6. Before running the Eagle installer or the Eagle software set environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include this directory (eg export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/joe/libeagle )

Enjoy!

Update (30 Jan 2012): I received some improvements to the script from Leandro (wisleca@gmail.com).  Revision 2 is here.