Linux BSOD!

Trouble started a few days ago when I wanted to tweak my resume, to squeeze in a few extra words, mention Vulkan and WebGL. On my Arch Linux machine, I use LibreOffice. I use on average about once or twice a month. I’ve never had trouble with it in the past, but this day it refused to run.

Running from command line, I saw an error message naming libicuuc.so.75 as missing. Why is that? Has it been missing for a long time? Why did LibreOffice work fine a few days earlier?

Then I recalled that I had upgraded some software. One was Spectacle, for screen captures. There was another package or two I had upgraded to get the latest version. In most cases, upgrading using “pacman -S somepackage” just brings in the new package and installs it. But one of those packages required upgrading also some libraries that I hadn’t heard of. I figured, okay, might as well let it.

Big mistake!

Everything ran fine, including the upgraded packages, but I hadn’t tried LibreOffice yet. Then this incident trying to adjust my resume.

After a bit of investigating, I found that LibreOffice, specifically lowriter, was looking specifically for version 75 of libicuuc, but my recent upgrades installed version 76.

Someone online (the ultimate guide to all wisdom) with the same problem created symlinks named according to version 75 pointing to the actual version 76 files. This worked for some people in that forum, but didn’t fix it for me.