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I'm new to the forum. Have little experience with Ubuntu.

I needed to install an epson scanner and a scanner program. I managed to make the scanner program xsane and iscan work. These did not suffice for the work I have so I bought Vuescan in order the do my work on this platform. (I'm going to scan a lot of slides).

Vuescan did not work immediately. It reported some problems with the libstdc++.so.6 (.21 and .20 versions?)

I tried to fix the problems using first the desktop installer system. This was not possible. I kept getting errors and were not able to get a long this way.

I reverted to terminal and used apt-get different ways tracing solutions I found on the net.

Then I happened to install wrong version of the libstdc++ (for amd64) in place of the intel version i need. My mistake.

I tried different things to remove and reinstall the old version. Latest I have copied the ubuntu 14.04 intel versions of the libstdc++.so.6 and -.so.5 files into the /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/. Library.

What I see when I boot is: ubuntu fails to start the desktop. It reaches the login prompt and tries to start the desktop but reverts to the login prompt. I can start a terminal on ctrl alt f4. This gives some error messages. If I try to start apt-get I get similar errors: apt-get: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.6 invalid ELF header.

What can I do to locate the problem. What can I do to make the desktop to start. It keeps reverting to the login prompt.

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  • Yes. I cannot use apt-get because it just gives me the message: apt-get: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.6 invalid ELF header.
    – Mich
    Mar 2, 2018 at 22:37
  • Exactly what does: "Invalid ELF header" imply?
    – Mich
    Mar 2, 2018 at 23:32

1 Answer 1

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In such case you need to download libstdc++6 package manually and install it:

wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gcc-4.8/libstdc++6_4.8.4-2ubuntu1~14.04.4_i386.deb
wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gcc-4.8/libstdc++6_4.8.4-2ubuntu1~14.04.4_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i --force-all libstdc++6_4.8.4-2ubuntu1~14.04.4_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i --force-all libstdc++6_4.8.4-2ubuntu1~14.04.4_amd64.deb

Then continue as usual

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install -f
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  • As noted in my question, it is an intel 64 bit machine. My fault was that I used an advice similar to the advice you give here, and this way made my problem escalate. ;o) I have tried to download and install the intel versions of libstdc++6, but the problem is that I cannot use apt-get. (As I have noted above).
    – Mich
    Mar 2, 2018 at 22:40
  • I guess the amd64 version does not fit with the intel64?
    – Mich
    Mar 2, 2018 at 22:48
  • Yes, but isn't it two different architectures and instruction sets?
    – Mich
    Mar 2, 2018 at 23:35
  • How can I make apt-get work?
    – Mich
    Mar 2, 2018 at 23:36
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    Then using the apt-get procedure made things up to date. Later I realized that recent version of vuescan uses a version of the gcc++ not supported by ubuntu 14.04. I downgraded to a previous version (from 9.6.06 down to version 9.4.67) This removed all my problems.
    – Mich
    Mar 3, 2018 at 20:01

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