Connectome workbench download on linux ubuntu 24.04 This application failed to start because it could not find or load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "".

[Shawn D'Souza]

Hello,

I am new to terminal and linux. I am trying to download connectome workbench to a lab linux computer that is running ubuntu 24.04. I followed the READ ME instructions but I keep getting this error:

This application failed to start because it could not find or load the Qt platform plugin "xcb"

in "".

Available platform plugins are: linuxfb, minimal, offscreen, xcb.

Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Aborted (core dumped)

I saw someone in the past had a similar issue and I used the terminal code they posted to fix the issue, but when I opened connectome workbench, it would crash as soon as I clicked anything on the wb_view gui. 

I currently do not have admin access so I cannot use the neurodebian download. Is there any way to get around this error? 

Thank you!

[Glasser, Matthew]

Is this in a physical display or over some kind of remote desktop/virtual desktop?

Do you have a GPU with the appropriate driver installed?

Matt.

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[Tim Coalson]

Are you running the wb_view in the bin_linux64/ directory?  That one is supposed to set the Qt plugin directory so it can find these things.  Did you unzip the entire archive preserving the folders, or did you try to run it from a zip file window?

Interesting that it listed xcb as available, maybe it did find the plugins, but the libraries we include are incompatible with newer linux.

Tim

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[Shawn D'Souza]

Hi thank you both for getting back to me. I was able to download it through miniconda/bioconda after getting sudo access

But to answer the other questions in case someone else has a similar issue in the future, I'm on a physical desktop, and the current GPU I have is 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation AlderLake-S GT1 (rev 0c), driver: i915 v: kernel. And yes I was trying to run it from the bin_linux64 directory and I unzipped the entire archive. 

[Ezequiel Mikulan]

Hi all, I'm also facing this issue Ubuntu 24.04. I am running from the bin_linux64 directory with all the files properly extracted and i have an NVIDIA GPU with all the drivers installed. Running "ldd libqxcb.so" inside libs_linux64/plugins/platforms shows that it is finding everything. I you find a way to use the software without going through bioconda please let me know. Thanks

[Tim Coalson]

if you run "QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS=1 wb_view", then somewhere in the mess of text that comes out should be an explanation of why it decided it couldn't load the xcb plugin.

Neurodebian (https://neuro.debian.net/) provides workbench built against the system versions of qt, etc for debian and ubuntu.  Unfortunately, we don't have a similar option for fedora-like OSes (there was an attempt in neurofedora, but they haven't touched it in a while).

Tim

[Tim Coalson]

bashcomplete and ffmpeg are not plugins.  I suspect qt is just checking the same directory as the executables to increase the convenience of bundling things with the executables (perhaps to make it more similar to how windows behaves).  The actual qt plugins (and the environment variable pointing to them) should be in libs_linux64/plugins.

I would guess that preloading the system's version of freetype pulled in another library that isn't compatible the version expected by our build (on an older OS), which made other libraries included in our zip not able to be loaded.  We are looking into building our linux zip distribution on a newer OS.

Tim

On Tue, Sep 9, 2025 at 7:55 AM Ezequiel Mikulan <e.mi...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks, the output pointed to this error "/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfontconfig.so.1: undefined symbol: FT_Done_MM_Var", so I did "export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so.6" to point to the font file in my system and the first problem disappeared. 

But then a new one came up "OpenGL (3D Graphics System) is not available. This may be caused by missing or outdated OpenGL libraries.On Linux, this may be caused by a missing plugin library <pluginspath>/xcbglintegrations/libqxcb-glx-integration.so.", my OpenGL seems to be working fine: "OpenGL version string: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 570.169". Debugging again i found some lines like this "QElfParser: '/home/eze/soft/workbench/exe_linux64/bashcomplete_wb_command' is not an ELF object "'/home/eze/soft/workbench/exe_linux64/bashcomplete_wb_command' is not an ELF object" not a plugin" and this "QFactoryLoader::QFactoryLoader() looking at "/home/eze/soft/workbench/exe_linux64/ffmpeg" "Plugin verification data mismatch in '/home/eze/soft/workbench/exe_linux64/ffmpeg'" not a plugin." which might help understanding the issue.

I will try neurodebian (their page that provides the setup code doesn't seem to be working properly at the moment). If I find another solution I'll write back.