Cura Lulzbot Edition, Ubuntu 18.04, and GLIBC_2.28

Update (Mar 15, 2021): Apparently Lulzbot is actually building releases again, and they’ve released one compiled for Stretch. Just use that and you’ll be fine. Here’s the link. The rest of this is no longer needed, and indeed their source seemed to have a few bugs that I kept tripping over today (specifically multiply object). Then the power cable to the bed failed, and my fun is over until I get a replacement connector later this week.

Upgrading my workshop machine is one of those things that’s been on my “to do” list now for several years. Having had some time this afternoon on conference calls, I finally got around to it. Out with the old i5-3750K, in with the “new” (retired from my primary desktop) i7-6700K. I figured it would be an easy transition. Throw on Ubuntu 18.04 (can’t move to 20.04 for a couple reasons yet), copy over my home directory, set a few things, and bada bing, we’re back in business, right?

Of course there’s always those things you forget. One of those was that Ubuntu 18.04 and the packages of Lulzbot’s version of Cura don’t get along. Their deb for 3.6.23 was linked against glibc 2.28, which is newer than the 2.27 in 18.04 and derivatives (such as Mint 19.x, which is what I was running before). So it’ll install, but it won’t run. All you get is this fun error:

/usr/share/cura-lulzbot/cura-lulzbot: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.28’ not found

Despite this being a problem since the last versions of their packages were released in the summer of 2019, nobody’s done anything to fix it. (The fact the company cratered about 18 months ago and was subsequently sold and moved to North Dakota probably doesn’t help. While I’m in the process of transitioning to mostly using my Prusa i3 MK3S, the old Lulzbot Mini (with a lot of the upgrades to make it almost a Mini 2) still gets lots of use. And until somebody gets good support for the machine into something like Prusa Slicer, I’m stuck with Lulzbot’s last version of cura.

Last time I think I managed to get glibc 2.28 installed somehow, but I decided I didn’t want to go that route this time. Instead, I just rebuilt 3.6.22 directly from Lulz’s source archive specifically for 18.04. Thanks to a post by “carlson” on the Lulzbot forums, it was mostly incredibly easy. The only thing I needed to figure out is where the source went. Since AO/Lulzbot shut down their git server, the source you need is over at Gitlab now: https://gitlab.com/lulzbot3d/cura-le/curabuild-lulzbot Otherwise you can pretty much follow carlson’s directions verbatim if you want to build your own.

So to save anybody else the headache and the hour or so of compilation, here’s the finished Debian package. I’ll admit I’m not an expert – or hell, even a novice – at building packages. Also, I wouldn’t trust some rando on the internet either, but I promise I’m not a Russian hacker trying to trojan your machine… comrade. 🙂

cura-lulzbot-3.6.22-Linux.deb (~146Mbytes, version 3.6.22 built Jan 14, 2020)

Just download it and sudo dpkg --install cura-lulzbot-3.6.22-Linux.deb and that should do the trick.