Today when I went to start up QGIS on my Arch Linux box I noticed it failed. When I went to start it in terminal I got the following error:

qgis: error while loading shared libraries: libqwt.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This is because the qwt libraries are in in /usr/lib/qwt and QGIS is looking for them in /usr/lib. To solve this we can create a symbolic link in /usr/lib to link to the correct file. For me this was:

# ln -s /usr/lib/qwt/libqwt.so.6.1.2 /usr/lib/libqwt.so.6

If you are like me, when you try to start QGIS it will fail once more. This time the error is:

qgis: error while loading shared libraries: libproj.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Similar to before, we can solve this by creating a symbolic link to the file QGIS is looking for:

# ln -s /usr/lib/libproj.so.9.0.0 /usr/lib/libproj.so.0

After these fixes QGIS started without error.

Thanks for reading! If this helped you, feel free to let me know on facebook or twitter.

Edit (06/13/2015):

You’ll have to remove libqwt.so.6 to update.

# rm /usr/lib/libqwt.so.6

Then updating should work again.

# pacman -Syu