Upgrade from 18.04 to 20.04 Kills Mentor Graphics modelsim

When I updated my Lubuntu 18.04 today, Weds, Oct 21, it gave me the option to upgrade to version 20.04, which I casually accepted. However, since then I have found that one of my key development tools: mentor graphics’ modelsim, now fails with the following message:

$ vsim conflict.hp962_yuan_20200923.mpf
/opt/modelsim/modelsim_dlx/bin/…/linuxpe/vish: error while loading shared libraries: libncurses.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I would like to know how to correct this?

Looks like commercial/proprietary software to me, which is to say the free software community cannot be relied upon to provide support for it, since we can’t really know anything about it since the source code isn’t available. tl;dr, contact Mentor Graphics.

However, the error is self explanatory: a required library is missing or not found where it expects to find it. The file is installed by the libncurses5 package, specifically at /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.5. So you should check to make sure you have that package installed and then if you still have problems, ask Mentor if that location is compatible with their software. If not, you’ll either need to have them fix it (again, the source code isn’t available so we can’t even provide fixes) or set up a symlink between the correct location and the one they expect.

Do we expect or know that library to have been moved or removed by the upgrade?

It shouldn’t have been, but it’s hard to say. Some other package(s) you have could have led to a dependency that required libncurses6 instead of libncurses5, both of which are an option in 20.04 but only 5 existed in 18.04. Assuming that Mentor isn’t using a normal package archive (common for third party software), the packaging system would have no way to anticipate its requirements. Again, I would consult with Mentor.

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