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: libgdal.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This is because the QGIS is looking for the libgdal libraries that no longer exist at that location. To fix this we can create a symbolic link to the correct location.

To find the correct location we can search the /usr/lib directory:

$ ls /usr/lib/*libgdal*
libgdal.so  libgdal.so.20  libgdal.so.20.0.0

In this case I found the that libgdal.so.20.0.0 is the one I need, where libgdal.so and libgdal.so.20 are just symbolic links to libgdal.so.20.0.0.

So let’s create a symbolic link to libgdal.so.20.0.0 from libgdal.so.1

# ln -s /usr/lib/libgdal.so.20.0.0 /usr/lib/libgdal.so.1

After this fix, qgis seems to start up as expected. Simple enough right?

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



Edit 2015-11-08: fixed second command to read ln (link) not ls.