FreeCad and ODA file converter stopped working on Ubuntu 18.04

Recently ODA File converter stopped working entirely and FreeCad UI is acting strange. Looking squished and roll down windows are empty. Any ideas? Anyone noticed something similar?

I am running Ubuntu 20.04 and facing similar problem. ODAFileConverter uses Qt_5.14 but most probably your system has older version.

The fix for me was:

1. Install QT 5.15 from other ppa https://launchpad.net/~beineri

2. Append line to .bashrc to export LD_LIBRARY_PATH which is used by ODAFileConverter.

   export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/qt515/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
   

3. Fix for GLIBCXX_3.4.28 not found by updating .bashrc line again

   export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/9/:/opt/qt515/lib/:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
   

Please note that you may have other versions of QT and paths, so please adapt solution for yourself

For Ubuntu 18.04 LTS the reproducible way to fix is the following.

As Boris have already recommended in his answer we need to use special PPA, in our case it is named "Qt 5.14.2 for /opt Bionic" and then adjust library paths in the ODA executable scripts as follows:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:beineri/opt-qt-5.14.2-bionic
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qt514-meta-minimal

sudo sed -i "s|^export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/|export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/qt514/lib/:/|" /usr/bin/ODADrawingsExplorer /usr/bin/ODAFileConverter

and enjoy.

For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS the method is similar:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:beineri/opt-qt-5.14.2-focal
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qt514-meta-minimal

sudo sed -i "s|^export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/|export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/qt514/lib/:/|" /usr/bin/ODADrawingsExplorer /usr/bin/ODAFileConverter

Confirmed: If running standalone in a terminal there is a QT library problem

firstuser@claire2:~$ ODAFileConverter

/usr/bin/ODAFileConverter_21.7.0.0/ODAFileConverter: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5Core.so.5: version `Qt_5.14' not found (required by /usr/bin/ODAFileConverter_21.7.0.0/ODAFileConverter)

robert@claire2:~$ qmake --version

QMake version 3.1 Using Qt version 5.9.5 in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu robert@claire2:~$

Looks like a version mismatch. One solution would be to build a newer version of QT which is a bit of work. With few exceptions, distros only update packages with bug fixes of existing versions of SW (like Qt 5.9.5) and do not build packages from new upstream versions (like Qt 5.14).

In a better world, I would have expected dependency checking to have failed and installation or update of ODA converter being prevented.