Warning:

The GuitarPro deb is dangerously packaged!

• On a 64-bit system, if you apt-get -f install after trying to install it, apt-get will want to remove the following system critical packages, which can ruin your Ubuntu installation!

  
  
  

  The following packages will be REMOVED:
  
  gksu guitarpro6:i386 libgksu2-0 libpam-gnome-keyring sudo ubuntu-desktop
  
  ubuntu-minimal update-manager update-notifier xauth xinit xorg




• sudo? update-manager?? X! What are the developers thinking?! It also makes apt-get think a bunch of i386 packages are installed when none have been. Here's the full gory pastebin.

Safely Install GuitarPro without apt-get wanting to remove it

• I believe the above behavior comes from the deb's dumb dependency on gksu:i386 (which is the graphical root elevation package)


• Unfortunately, the only safe way to install this and not have to deal with apt-get's whining is to manually install it and its dependencies. Here's how:

How to manually examine and safely install a binary i386 deb with its dependencies

• First, remove the current half-installed packaged with sudo dpkg --remove guitarpro:i386


• Now, change to the directory where your deb file is stored. For easy typing let's create a short symlink - my deb called gp6-full-linux-demo-r11100.deb, yours may differ:
  
  
  
  
  • ln -s gp6-full-linux-demo-r11100.deb gp6.deb
  
  

1. Examine the deb's architecture and dependencies

First, we examine the deb's dependencies without installing it.

• dpkg-deb -I gp6.deb shows us:

  
  
  

   new debian package, version 2.0.
  
  size 172147458 bytes: control archive= 75020 bytes.
  
   375 bytes,    10 lines      control
  
  
  335109 bytes,  2770 lines      md5sums
  
  
  Package: GuitarPro6
  
  Version: 6.1.3
  
  Section: non-free/audio
  
  Priority: optional
  
  Architecture: i386
  
  Depends: libc6 (>= 2.1.3), libstdc++6, libasound2, libxml2, libxslt1.1, libportaudio0, libportaudio2, libglu1-mesa, gksu, libssl0.9.8
  
  Installed-Size: 222632
  
  Maintainer: Arobas Music 
  
  Description: http://www.guitar-pro.com
  
  Guitar Pro 6, Linux Version.




• So this is an i386 application, and all its dependencies are also going to be i386.



• The first thing to do is install the ia32-libs i386 compatibility package, if you haven't already:
  
  
  
  
  • sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
  
  


• Let's also copy and paste the package's dependencies in a text file, for later.

2. "Extract" the deb into a tar archive and examine its contents

• Let's extract the deb to a tar archive now so we can examine its contents without having to install it:
  
  
  
  
  • dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile gp6.deb > gp6.tar
  
  



• And open up the File Manager (Nautilus), and mount the gp6.tar as an archive by right-clicking and selecting Open in Archive Mounter; after that you'll see gp6.tar added to the bottom the left sidebar, with an eject icon next to it:

  
  
  

  




• Go to the View Menu for File Manager, and change the Sidebar to the Tree view option instead of Places:

  
  
  

  




• Now expand the gp6.tar tree in the sidebar by clicking on the triangles; repeat for each level until you can see the folder structure of the file:

  
  
  

  




• From the structure, we see that the program's files go into two locations: /opt and /usr/share:

  
  
  
  
  
  • Anything that goes into /opt is self-contained and will not affect anything else on the system.
  
  
  • We see that /usr/share only contains icons/bitmaps, which are harmless.
  
  

3. If it's safe, "install" the program by extracting the tar file

• Go back to the terminal, and make sure you are in the directory containing the downloaded deb/tar files. Then type:

  
  
  

  
  
  sudo tar -C / -xvf gp6.tar
  
  




• This will extract the program files in the appropriate locations, showing you the file names and progress. (Sample Output)

  
  
  
  
  
  • The -C switch tells tar to perform this operation relative to the root directory, not the current directory.
  
  

4. Figure out which dependencies are missing with ldd, install them, and rock-and-roll!

• Open up the /opt/GuitarPro6 folder in the File Manager:

  
  
  

  

  
  
  
  
  
  • We see that the executable is called GuitarPro (with the diamond-"gears" icon), and also that a lot of lib-xxxx files are included in the folder.
  
  
  • This is normal for binary-only programs; they try to include the versions of the specific libraries they need, since those may not be available from the repositories of a specific distribution.
  
  



• Along with these included libraries and the ia32-libs package, most 32-bit dependencies should have been installed. Instead of blindly installing the dependencies we saw in the deb file info via apt-get--which can cause problems-- let's figure out if we're actually missing anything.

  
  
  
  
  
  • Go back to the terminal, and change to the GuitarPro directory with cd /opt/GuitarPro6
  
  

Using ldd

• Type ldd GuitarPro | grep found, and the output will be libportaudio.so.2 => not found

  
  
  
  
  
  • ldd prints the dependencies (shared libraries) of a program, and whether they exist or not on the system. Here's what the full output of GuitarPro looks like.
  
  
  • To make life easier, we simply filter for the ones that do not exist via grep found.
  
  



• Here, only the libportaudio2 library is missing. But the dependencies said libportaudio0? (see step 1.) Which is it??

  
  
  
  
  
  • Let's search for the available versions using apt-cache search libportaudio from the terminal.
  
  
  • That's tells us that both libportaudio2 and libportaudio0 packages are available. Let's install the 2 first, with
    
    

    sudo apt-get install libportaudio2:i386

  
  
  • The :i386 part is very important, since our program is 32-bit. If apt-get asks to replace/remove libportaudio2 and/or other files, that's OK, because some libraries cannot be installed simultaneously in both 32- and 64-bit versions.
  
  



• Let's double-check dependencies one final time: ldd GuitarPro6 | grep found gives us nothing (that's what we want!)

  
  
  
  
  
  • If you get the error ./GuitarPro: /opt/GuitarPro6/./libz.so.1: version ZLIB_1.2.3.3 not found (required by /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxml2.so.2) this means that Guitar Pro is using a wrong version of libz, fix this by removing the libz.so.1 file from the GuitarPro6 directory:
    
    

    sudo rm libz.so.1

    
    
    Guitar Pro will fall back to the libz version of your system.
  
  



• Exit the terminal and go back to the /opt/GuitarPro6 folder in the File Manager. Double-click GuitarPro and...

  
  
  

  




• Clean-up the Download folder by deleting the tar file from the File Manager.

5. The launcher shortcut has already been added

• Because the package already contained a GuitarPro6.desktop shortcut that was extracted to /usr/share/applications, there is no need to manually create one. It's sitting there in the Launcher: