Dificulty installing Avogadro2 on Ubuntu 24

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1

My goal: use avogadro to calculate electrostatic surfaces of small molecules to import into Blender for figures (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2M2mMCKpeQ)

I am using ubuntu 24.10 currently, what I have tried so far:

  1. sudo apt-get installation method and worked nicely to install the program. Issue was that a) could not export molecule as PDB and b) was unable to select an energy function to calculate an electrostatic surface with

  2. I realized I might be missing packages/extensions so I opted to download the nightly build but I am truly struggling to compile it. I am not familiar with this process. List of issues I have come up against:

a) after “cmake -DQT_VERSION=5 -DBUILD_MOLEQUEUE=OFF -S ./openchemistry -B ./build” command I get the error:

CMake Error at /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/cmake/Qt5/Qt5Config.cmake:28 (find_package):
Could not find a package configuration file provided by “Qt5Svg” with any ofthe following names:…

b) I tried to change -DQT_VERSION=6, but a similar issue appeared:
CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:89 (find_package):
By not providing “FindQt6.cmake” in CMAKE_MODULE_PATH this project has
asked CMake to find a package configuration file provided by “Qt6”, but
CMake did not find one.

c) I tried to use the other recommendation for Linux compiling with clang++ and used the line “cmake -DQT_VERSION=5 -DBUILD_MOLEQUEUE=OFF -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=clang -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=clang++ -S ./openchemistry -B ./build”

this yielded the error:
"CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:2 (project):
The CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER:

clang++

is not a full path and was not found in the PATH."

Past attempts to climb this mountain and I would download all kinds of packages and versions of QT, having no idea what I am changing on my operating system/environment so I am wondering if anyone can save me some trial an error?

I have self taught my self coding all for 10 years and never posted on stack overflow. This is the problem that finally broke me :frowning: would love to use this software but really need help figuring out what I am missing to get this all to work.

Earnestly,
Michael

2

You don’t need to compile the nightly build. For Linux, we list both AppImage and a beta Flatpak build:
https://two.avogadro.cc/install/

As far as building from source, if that’s what you want to do, other users have updated the build guide: Building Source Code — Avogadro 1.99.0 documentation

3

As Geoff says, you are best off fetching either the nightly AppImage or beta Flatpak, according to your preference.

But I can tell you that your specific errors when compiling are being caused by: a) you not having the development libraries for Qt5Svg installed; b) you not having Qt6 development libraries installed; c) you not having clang installed. Geoff’s link tells you what you need to install.

4

Thank you for the replies. The flat pack worked well for me! I had not used it before.

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