missing libncurses.so.5

Question

I was installing free pascal IDE on Ubuntu 12.04 at x64 AMD. When i run fp file it says:

./fp: error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I searched Google and found out that i have libncurses.so.5 library installed as

/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.5.9

and link pointing at it

/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.5

So i created a link in /lib pointing at /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.5 Now fp file found library, but it's not pleased with it...

./fp: error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.5: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

Is ok to create link to link? Am i missing a library or is it just not installed correctlly?

Solution

You are trying to run a 32-bit binary on a 64-bit system. You need to delete the link you created, and instead install libncurses5:i386 so that you have the 32-bit version installed as well. It should be ported to Multi-Arch in 12.40, but you may have problems with some libraries and applications as not all of them are ported on 12.04.