This KB identifies installation requirements and some problems that may occur when installing Synergy/DE 10.1 on the various flavors of Linux. For information on Synergy 10.3 on Linux, see KB 2199.

Synergy 10.1 is officially supported only on Red Hat and SUSE Linux; however, customers have had success running on other varieties, such as Ubuntu and Fedora, so we include information on those platforms when we can. Just be aware that if you are running on an unsupported Linux platform, Synergex may not be able to help you if you run into problems.

Required libraries

Synergy/DE requires the following libraries for all Linux platforms:

libstdc++.so.6 (required by the compiler)

libc.so.6 (required by all Synergy components)

libncurses.so.5 (required by the runtime -- dbr and dbs)

If these are not already on your system, download and install them using a package manager. (Some common package managers are apt-get, dpkg, rpm, and yum.) For example, you can download libraries for Red Hat from http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/index.html, libraries for Ubuntu from http://packages.ubuntu.com, and for information on Fedora packages start here http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Using_the_package_database.

Note that you can see which libraries are required by any application by running the ldd (that\'s a lowercase \'L\') command followed by the program name. This command is supported on all UNIX platforms. For example, to see which libraries the Synergy runtime requires, you\'d use this command:

ldd dbr

Below are some errors that you may see when installing (or running) Synergy on Linux.

Error: "Bad ELF Interpreter: no such file or directory" or just "no such file or directory"

This error can occur when necessary libraries are missing. See the instructions below for your Linux platform.

Red Hat: The legacy library glibc.i686 is missing. To resolve this problem, do the following: 

1. Log in as root.

2. At a command prompt type:

yum install glibc.i686

Fedora: Legacy libraries are missing. To resolve the problem, do the following:

1. Log in as root.

2. At a command prompt type:

su -c \'yum groupinstall "Legacy Software Development"

yum install ncurses-libs-5.7.2.20090207.fc11.i586

3. Enter the password for the root account when prompted.

CentOS: The legacy library glibc.i686 is missing. To resolve the problem, do the following:

1. Log in as root.

2. At a command prompt type:

          yum install glibc.i686

Ubuntu: The c runtime library glibc and/or libcurses.so.5 are missing. To resolve this problem, do the following: 

1. Log in as root.

2. At a command prompt type:

    yum install glibci686

Error: "cpio: p  remature end of file"

You may see this error when extracting the downloaded installation files with the standard "cpio" command on any Linux platform. If so, try one of the following:

1. Remove the -c option from the command line. For example,

cpio -iBvudm < 428SDE1011.a

1. Use the version of gzip that comes with your operating system rather than the one distributed with the Synergy installation. Just rename the gzip included in the installation and copy the operating system gzip to that directory. (It is usually located in either /usr/bin or /bin.)