For some side project I wanted to look at the schematics of the Adafruit PowerBoost 500C, which happened to be made with Autodesk EAGLE.

Having run EAGLE on Debian 9 (stretch) for a while now without great hassle, I did not expect much difficulties, I was wrong. First I downloaded the tarball from their download site. Don’t worry, there’s still the “free” version for hobbyists, however it’s not Free Software, but precompiled binaries for amd64 architecture, better than nothing.

After extracting, I tried to start it like this and got the first error:

alex@lemmy ~/opt/eagle-9.6.0 % ./eagle
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::runtime_error'
  what():  locale::facet::_S_create_c_locale name not valid
[1]    20775 abort      ./eagle

There’s no verbose or debug option. And according to the comments on the blog post “How to Install Autodesk EAGLE On Windows, Mac and Linux” the problem also affects other users. I vaguely remembered somewhere deep in the back of my head, I already had this problem some time ago on another machine, and tried something not obvious at all. My system locale is German, looked like this before:

alex@lemmy ~ % locale
LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

alex@lemmy ~ % locale -a
C
C.UTF-8
de_DE.utf8
POSIX

As you can see, no English locale, so I added one. On Debian you do it like this. Result below:

% sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

alex@lemmy ~/opt/eagle-9.6.0 % locale -a
C
C.UTF-8
de_DE.utf8
en_US.utf8
POSIX

This seems like a typical “works on my machine” problem from an US developer, huh? Next try starting eagle, you’ll see the locale problem is gone, the next error appears:

alex@lemmy ~/opt/eagle-9.6.0 % ./eagle 
./eagle: symbol lookup error: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libGLX_mesa.so.0: undefined symbol: xcb_dri3_get_supported_modifiers

That’s the problem if you don’t build from source against the libraries of the system. In that case EAGLE ships a shared object libxcb-dri3.so.0, which itself is linked against the libxcb.so.1 from my host system, and those don’t play well together. I found a solution to that in a forum thread “Can’t run EAGLE on Debian 10 (testing)” and it is using the ld_preload trick:

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libxcb-dri3.so.0 ./eagle

This works. Hallelujah.