Guide: How to build and run Anki from Source with Xubuntu 20.04

Development
1

I took me some time to build and run Anki from Source so I just wanted to give a guide how it worked eventually. I used a clean installation of Xubuntu 20.04 within VirtualBox 6.1 and Anki 2.1.47.

  1. Install Xubuntu (xubuntu-20.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso) into a new VM. I allowed the installation of third-party software (probably does not matter).
  2. Install VirtualBox Guest Additions and the automatic Xubuntu updates.
  3. Install these packages and bazel according to linux.md
sudo apt install bash grep findutils curl gcc g++ git
curl -L https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazelisk/releases/download/v1.7.4/bazelisk-linux-amd64 -o ./bazel
chmod +x bazel && sudo mv bazel /usr/local/bin/
  1. Download Anki (2.1.47 in this case)
    I used ankidev as folder name. According to development.md don’t use ~/Anki or ~/Documents/Anki.
git clone https://github.com/ankitects/anki.git --single-branch -b 2.1.47 ankidev
cd ankidev
git checkout -b 2.1.47
  1. To solve this build error

ERROR: An error occurred during the fetch of repository ‘py_deps’: [
]
ImportError: cannot import name ‘sysconfig’ from ‘distutils’ (/usr/lib/python3.8/distutils/init.py)

I had to install this package:

sudo apt install python3.8-distutils

See also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63823964/importerror-cannot-import-name-sysconfig-from-distutils-usr-lib-python3-8

  1. To solve this build error

/usr/bin/env: ‘python’: No such file or directory
Target //qt:runanki failed to build

I had to install this package

sudo apt install python-is-python3

This sets python3 as your standard python. It seems to be a common topic for Ubuntu 20.04. You will find more info about it with Google.

  1. Start the build
./run

In my case it took ~70 mins and downloaded ~660 MB.

  1. At the first start of Anki I got a few errors of the type

Qt info: Could not load the Qt platform plugin “xcb” in “” even though it was found.
Qt fatal: This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

See below for details on how to solve them. I had to install these additional packages:

sudo apt install
libxcb-icccm4
libxcb-image0
libxcb-keysyms1
libxcb-render-util0
libxcb-xinerama0
libxcb-xkb1

After that Anki started. I just got a warning that the Anki database file is corrupt and will be recreated.

Details:

Error: Qt info: Could not load the Qt platform plugin “xcb” in “” even though it was found.
Qt fatal: This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Run export QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS=1 for more details according to this and you will get this type of message:

Qt warning: QLibraryPrivate::loadPlugin failed on "/home/khs/.cache/bazel/_bazel_khs/2ebc355c94ffa15c275887aebe564b30/external/pyqt5/PyQt5/Qt/plugins/platforms/libqxcb.so" : "Cannot load library /home/khs/.cache/bazel/_bazel_khs/2ebc355c94ffa15c275887aebe564b30/external/pyqt5/PyQt5/Qt/plugins/platforms/libqxcb.so: (libxcb-icccm.so.4: Kann die Shared-Object-Datei nicht öffnen: Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden)"

It says (in German) that libqxcb.so cannot find libxcb-icccm.so. Use sudo apt search libxcb-icccm to find the corresponding package name - in this case libxcb-icccm4. Install it with sudo apt install libxcb-icccm4 and repeat for all missing libraries. You can also run ldd on libxcb.so to see all missing libraries at once:

ldd /home/khs/.cache/bazel/_bazel_khs/2ebc355c94ffa15c275887aebe564b30/external/pyqt5/PyQt5/Qt/plugins/platforms/libqxcb.so
8 Likes
2

Thanks for taking the time to post; I have tweaked docs/linux.md and added a link here.