Running Kactus2 on CentOS 7

[abdullahyildiz]

Since the latest version of Kactus2 requires Qt6 and the newer versions of Qt are not maintained in CentOS 7 package repositories, I can also suggest running Kactus2 in a Docker container on CentOS 7.

For this, just create a Ubuntu Docker image on your CentOS 7 host machine and build Kactus2 in the Docker image itself. For those who are not very experienced with Docker: do not forget to save your changes via docker commit otherwise you may have to repeat the same installation steps.

# before starting Kactus2 in your Docker container, run the following command to enable applications running in the Docker container to use GUI of CentOS 7:
<centos> xhost +
# start the Docker container - assuming the image name is ubuntu:kactus2
<centos> docker run -ti --rm -e DISPLAY=$DISPLAY -v /tmp/.X11-unix/:/tmp/.X11-unix ubuntu:kactus2

Now the Docker container should be up and running:

# type kactus2 in your terminal:
<ubuntu> kactus2

Please note that the following workaround (which is explained here) should be applied if the Docker host is CentOS 7 and if you receive the error "libQt6Core.so.6: cannot open shared object file" received when starting Kactus2:

# run the following command in your Docker container to resolve the issue:
<ubuntu> strip --remove-section=.note.ABI-tag libQt6Core.so.6
# type kactus2 in your terminal:
<ubuntu> kactus2

Note: The solution has been tested to run Kactus2 Release for version 3.13.0.

[hagantsa]

Hi,

Thank you for sharing! I'll link this in our wiki page for others to find.