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I've tried installing Mathematica 11 on Fedora 29 using the .sh install file. The installation seems to have worked (no errors and everything looks normal). However, when I attempt to run Mathematica I get the following error
/usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/11.3/SystemFiles/FrontEnd/Binaries/Linux-x86-64/Mathematica: symbol lookup error: /lib64/libfontconfig.so.1: undefined symbol: FT_Done_MM_Var
Seems to be some sort of font error, but I don't know how to fix it.
I had same problem on different Linux. I will show what I did.
This is a known issue. see https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/57948
Problems with fontconfig and Mathematica. The following error is reported. /usr/local/Wolfram/Mathematica/11.2/SystemFiles/FrontEnd/Binaries/Linux-x86-64/Mathematica: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1: undefined symbol: FT_Done_MM_Var
What I did is this: become root, and removed 3 libs related to this error, from inside Mathematica system folder. To be safe, you can rename them instead.
Remove or rename freetype.so. and I remember also removing libz.so.
Here is the main link I used to help with this.
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8198000.html?sid=ab27c1ca8e1927691858595185e18284
I switched back to windows for desktop since then.
I did send bug report to WRI on this. CASE:4082638 This is the reply I got
This may be related to a known issue and the developers are working on resolving it for a future Mathematica version. In the meantime, please consider placing libfreetype.so.6 in the MathematicaInstallationDirectory/SystemFiles/Libraries/Linux-x86-64/ directory. The libfreetype.so.6 component is available at https://wolfr.am/vO0qvWH7PW: Another option is reverting back to fontconfig 2.12. Please let us know if neither option resolves the behavior. Wolfram Technical Supportsupport.wolfram.com
btw, I did not follow the instructions in the email above, since by the time I got the reply, the problem was resolved by deleting these libraries mentioned above.
libfreetype.so and libfreetype.so.6, which didn't help. But now I also renamed libz.so.1, and that seems to have resolved the problem.
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adding a subchapter leads to an error/wrong formating If you mean you were above to start Mathematica now OK, but you have an issue using afterwords, then I would suggest making a new question on that. Myself do not use Mathematica on Linux. But on windows now.
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On 5.13.13-arch1-1 updated september 1 of 2021 fails this solution, after searching doesn't find solution I copy previous version of libz and libfreetype with mathematica working and copy and paste into Mathematica-FOLDER/SystemFiles/Libraries/Linux-x86-64 and mathematica works again
you can get these ones here https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Z0ExZtxmAJ4AXOUEm085tLdL141dladn?usp=sharing
All solutions here did not work for me. However, this did work: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mathematica#Troubleshooting
