Running Blender on Fedora 13 runs into a small problem which probably exists with some other Linux distributions. The error is as follows:

./blender: symbol lookup error: ./blender: undefined symbol: gzopen64

As far as I know, this is not a problem on Ubuntu because the zlib package for Ubuntu is compiled with gzopen64, or so I’ve gathered from several searches.

The fix for this bug is thankfully rather simple however a few hours searching didn’t really find any solutions so I wanted to write this up and share the solution.

You’re going to need to compile zlib. In my case, I found ubuntu’s zlib source tarball did the trick just fine. Just type this into your terminal.

wget -c http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/z/zlib/zlib_1.2.3.3.dfsg.orig.tar.gz

Extract it and cd to the directory. Then compile and make it as follows.

./configure
make

Note that you may have to install some extra packages. I’m not sure what these are because I already have a ton of development packages installed butit should be pretty easy to figure out.

Now you’ll need to prefix the patch to your zlib install to your blender launch command. This will vary depending on where you have blender and zlib. Here’s mine for an example:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/william/.applications/zlib-1.2.3.3.dfsg/ /home/william/.applications/blender-2.53-beta-linux-glibc27-i686/blender

If this has solved your problem, please let me know in the comments below. If it doesn’t work out or if you have any suggestions/tips for the article, I’d love to hear them.