Unable to find or load Qt platform plugin "xcb" on Debian stretch

Question

I've been having a problem loading software that use xcb, such as vlc and plasma desktop. Vlc gives the following error:

[0000000000ddc148] core libvlc: Running vlc with the default interface. Use 'cvlc' to use vlc without interface.

This application failed to start because it could not find or load the Qt platform plugin "xcb".

Available platform plugins are: linuxfb, minimal, minimalegl, offscreen, wayland-egl, wayland.

Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Aborted

I have libxcb1 and libx11-xcb1 installed; reinstalling them and vlc didn't fix the problem.

Solution 1

On what system? From the tags I'm assuming you are running Debian?

On debian jessie and testing, the xcb plugin is in the libqt5gui5 package, but vlc depends on it. On some older versions of qt5 packaging, the package containing the qpa plugin used to be libqt5xcbqpa5.

Solution 2

Two years later, on Debian 9.3 Stretch I solved it installing the package xcb-proto. So I post this answer for other users.

I was unable to run some programs: LibreCAD, MEGAsync, VirtualBox... They have in common some dependencies: libc6, libgcc1 libgl1 libqt5core5a libqt5widgets5 libstdc++6

Comments

[klubi]

I'm using debian. Installing libqt5gui5 solved the problem! Thank you! I'm a bit ashamed that i didn't look through the dependencies before asking.