Installing Guitar Pro 6 on Debian Jessie 64-bit

I want to edit sheets with Guitar Pro on Linux, too!

I wanted to use Arobas Music’s
Guitar Pro 6 on Debian Jessie 64-bit as they also provide a Linux version. However it can be rather difficult to install the software under certain circumstances for a number of reasons, so I decided to share my approach of the problem.

Download Guitar Pro files

Download Version 6 32-bit for Linux and standard sound banks. In my case I got two files:

gp6-full-linux-r11621.deb
Banks-r370.gpbank

Prepare your system

  1. Since the software just comes 32-bit-only you have to enable multi-arch on your system:
    sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
  2. Unfortunately Guitar Pro depends on two libraries which are not available for Debian Jessie, but are for Debian Wheezy (libportaudio0) and Debian Squeeze-LTS (libssl0.9.8). So you have to add those lines to the end of your
    /etc/apt/sources.list file:

    # necessary for guitar pro 6 dependency libssl0.9.8	
    deb [arch=i386] http://ftp.debian.org/debian squeeze-lts main	 	 
    
    # necessary for guitar pro 6 dependency libportaudio0	 
    deb [arch=i386] http://ftp.debian.org/debian wheezy main

    (You should able to build those libraries for your current system but this is beyond the scope of this tutorial)

  3. Install the necessary dependencies (32-bit versions):
    sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install libasound2:i386 libc6:i386 libglu1-mesa:i386 libportaudio0:i386 libportaudio2:i386 libssl0.9.8:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libxml2:i386 libxslt1.1:i386 zlib1g:i386 libpulse0:i386 libxrender1:i386 libglib2.0-0:i386 libpng12-0:i386 libfreetype6:i386 libfontconfig1:i386 libasound2-plugins:i386

Remove unnecessary dependencies

The software also depends on
gksu which I didn’t manage to install, so I removed the dependency from the package because it also works without it.

  1. Extract data and control information:
    dpkg-deb -x gp6-full-linux-r11621.deb gp6-full-linux-r11621
    dpkg-deb --control gp6-full-linux-r11621.deb gp6-full-linux-r11621/DEBIAN
  2. Remove gksu dependency: Open the control file in an editor …
    nano gp6-full-linux-r11621/DEBIAN/control

    and change the line

    Depends: gksu, libasound2, ...
    

    to:

    Depends: libasound2, ...
    
  3. Repack and clean up:
    dpkg -b gp6-full-linux-r11621 gp6-full-linux-r11621-modified.deb
    rm gp6-full-linux-r11621.deb gp6-full-linux-r11621/ -rf

Install the software

  1. First Guitar Pro 6:
    sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture gp6-full-linux-r11621-modified.deb
  2. Then the standard sound banks:
    /opt/GuitarPro6/GPBankInstaller Banks-r370.gpbank /opt/GuitarPro6
  3. You should be able to run Guitar Pro 6 now. After first start you’ll probably see the activation-dialogue, where you have to enter your licensing information.

Let me know if this tutorial was able to help you or if you experienced difficulties on the way. Also if you can provide some insight why I could not install gksu in 32-bit version, feel free to leave a comment…

Author: xmoex

I'm a computer sience student currently working on my master's degree. At the moment I'm interested in the topics C++, Java and parallelization.

24 thoughts on “Installing Guitar Pro 6 on Debian Jessie 64-bit”

  1. Worked fine for me on Debian 8.2 GNOME, using the slightly newer 11686 version of Guitar Pro 6.

    Thanks!

  2. Thank you for this perfect manual! GuitarPro installed successfully, but when I started it, I got error

    /GuitarPro: /opt/GuitarPro6/./libz.so.1: version `ZLIB_1.2.3.3' not found (required by /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxml2.so.2)

    I solved this problem by deleting file libz.so.1 from /opt/GuitarPro directory.

    1. Thank you for sharing your experiences! Actually I might have done the same without mentioning it, accidentally. If I have the time soon, I plan on reproducing the whole setup from scratch.

  3. W: Imposible obtener http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/squeeze-lts/main/binary-i386/Packages  404  Not Found [IP: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx 80] (anonymized ip)

    ๐Ÿ™

    1. Hi Tony, sorry for answering late. I found out that debian squeeze has reached the end of it’s lifetime, so the repository has been moved to debian archives.
      In order to get things working again you could modify the debian-lts specific line of your sources.list to

      deb http://archive.debian.org/debian-archive/debian/ squeeze-lts main

      If you encounter an error like

      E: Release file expired, ignoring ...

      please follow this guide dealing with outdated repositories.

  4. Moe, thanks for the article. It helped me to remove the gksu dependency which I “thought” would help with the program crashing when you try to enter the license number. You get a dialog box that says:

    Failed to start Guitar Pro Updater.

    and then closes down when you hit OK. If you have any thoughts on that, it’d be great. I’m able to run the program but even if I run it from the .sh in bash I get no error message.

    FYI, I’m running Ubuntu 16.04 64 bit. It was quite a chore to find all the 32 bit libraries and get them installed but the programs seems to run; just can’t get to the point where I can pay for it…

    Update 1 (2:33 am)
    I will add that while I appreciate Arobas making a linux version available, Iโ€™m almost given up trying to get this 32 bit version to work. They would save a lot of people frustration and build good will by developing a 64 bit version.

    Update 2 (3:10 am)
    OK, problem solved. I had read that the updater does require gksu and it turns out to be true. I could not install gksu:i386 as it tried to remove sudo, however I ran a utility called gksu-properties and then installed gksu and it worked. What an ordeal!

    1. Hi Vic, thank you for your insight, I’ll try this myself. The entire unpacking/repacking part may become obsolete with your suggestion. That would make the whole process a lot easier!

  5. Hi, thanks a lot for the manual, but it doesn’t work. I got next error:

    The following packages have unmet dependencies:
    libasound2-plugins:i386 : Depends:
       libavcodec56:i386 (>= 6:11~beta1) but it is not going to be installed or
       libavcodec-extra-56:i386 (>= 6:11~beta1) but it is not going to be installed
    E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
  6. Hello, I don’t manage to do this command:

    dpkg-deb -x gp6-full-linux-r11621.deb gp6-full-linux-r11621

    that’s answer:

    impossible to read the archive ยซ gp6-full-linux-r11621.deb ยป: no file of this type.
    1. Maybe 11621 just isn’t the version number of the file you’ve downloaded? I’d recommend checking this and modifying your command…

      1. Thank you! Now I’ve got this problem with the installation of the banks:

        /opt/GuitarPro6/GPBankInstaller: error while loading shared libraries: libQtGui.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

        How can I fix this problem ? Thanks by advance. I’m a noobie

  7. Hi There, Will this fix not being able to open the progam with at the applications menu? I can only get Guitar Pro to run with the sudo command… from the command prompt.

    1. Hi Carl, you usually should be able to run the program from your applications menu. Do you have any kind of special setup? Does Guitar Pro appear in your applications menu and you are just not able to start it from there?

      1. Yes it appears there. I can’t start it without using the sudo command in the shell first, example:

        sudo /opt/GuitarPro6/launcher.sh

        Then it loads, unfortunately it crashes soon after I do anything and I don’t know why. Would you be able to help me solve this problem? I can’t seem to attach an image anywhere here.

        Update 1 (:20 am)
        You know what’s funny I rebooted my computer and it works with the sound now… must be a problem with cras (Chromium Audio Server) not interfacing properly ๐Ÿ™ I still can’t figure out why it doesn’t work without sudo however.. :-S

        Update 2 (9:26 am)
        Ah ha, this might help anyone with the same problem: in xfce you hold ALT + F3, then do a search for “Guitar Pro”, right click “Edit”. In command window change the path entry to

        gksu /opt/GuitarPro6/launcher.sh

        I’m guessing you need superuser privileges to do certain things. But the authentication window doesn’t necessarily come up by default you need to request it. So bizarre…

          1. btw your comment installing the banks you might want to update your instructions at the end to read:

            Instead of:
            /opt/GuitarPro6/GPBankInstaller Banks-r370.gpbank /opt/GuitarPro6

            Move the bank files from wherever you downloaded them to…into /opt/GuitarPro6/ folder by typing

            sudo mv (directory where they are downloaded)/GPBankInstaller Banks-r370.gpbank /opt/GuitarPro6

            Afterwards install by typing:
            sudo /opt/GuitarPro6/GPBankInstaller Banks-r370.gpbank /opt/GuitarPro6

            if you don’t type sudo it won’t work you get an obscure error message because you need root user privileges to install the bank files

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