Can't start latest stable on ubuntu 20.04

Support
19

Hello,

I have been having a look at the problems using Slicer 4.11.20200930 in Ubuntu 20.10. Here are my findings:

  • [Error 1] On a fresh installation of Ubuntu 20.10 libxcb-xinerama0 needs to be installed to avoid an error related to qt and xcb when starting Slicer. Installing qt5dxcb-plugin will include libxcb-xinerama0 and remove some other warnings during the execution of Slicer.

  • [Error 2] Slicer crashes with a segmentation fault on application launch. It seems the crash produces on the interaction of python (ctypes extension) with libffi (/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libffi.so.8). In Ubuntu 20.10 libffi is packaged in its 3.4 version, while in other distributions not having this problem the version is 3.3. This would suggest incompatibility between the python deployed in Slicer and libffi installed in Ubuntu 20.10; @manjula, could you check the version of libffi in PoP OS 20.10 just to discard this end?

  • [Workaround] The python version built in Slicer seems to come with its own libffi that can be built and included in libpython (statically) when BUILTIN_CTYPES=ON (in the python external project). Buiding the Slicer Python that way, Slicer seems to work properly. @pieper, @jcfr, @lassoan, my suggestion would be to check whether setting BUILTIN_CTYPES=ON breaks anyting for other OSs (Windows, different versions of Linux) and set it ON for the superbuild.

1 Like