How to install libncurses.so.5 in Ubuntu 20.04?

Question

I need both 32 bit and 64 bit for libncurses.so.5 on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) for building an Android application on an older Android NDK. What are my options? libncurses.so.5 is not on apt-get anymore.

Solution 1

You have to update your package lists, as this package is still available from universe pocket.

Install them with:

sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo apt-get install libncurses5 libncurses5:i386

Solution 2

So adding the universe pocket didn't completely solve my problem, I found out that I also had to set up the correct foreign architecture.

To set this up, I first checked main architecture, which was amd64, and foreign architecture was empty. So I needed to add the i386 architecture as well.

$ sudo dpkg --print-architecture 
$ sudo dpkg --print-foreign-architectures
$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 

Comments

[guiverc]

The i386 binary package is available - packages.ubuntu.com/focal/libncurses5 packages.ubuntu.com/focal/libncurses5-dev or am I missing something? packages.ubuntu.com/focal/i386/libncurses5/filelist

[eri0o]

this is weird, in the Software & Updates gui, the checkbox for Community-maintained free and open-source software (universe) is checked! Tried grep -r --include '*.list' '^deb ' /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ and universe appears there.

[eri0o]

it magically found the packages after I restarted my computer (had not restarted in at least a week...). Thanks!

[Denis Trofimov]

Thanks! Thats solved my: Wine cannot find the ncurses library (libncurses.so.5)

[dirceusemighini]

Isn't apt update missing between add repository and install?