Recently, I ran in to a problem where luatex demanded an older version of zlib than my system had installed.
It seems that this is a
fairly
common
problem.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t make any of the solutions work.
Trying to downgrade zlib was just a total hassle with my package management setup.
Eventually, I settled on the following brutal solution. Get a fresh (ancient) copy of zlib-1.2.11.tar.gz from here: https://zlib.net/fossils/zlib-1.2.11.tar.gz.
tar -xvf zlib-1.2.11.tar.gz
cd zlib-1.2.11
sudo ./configure; sudo make; sudo make install
cd /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
ln -s -f /usr/local/lib/libz.so.1.2.11/lib libz.so.1
After all of this, evince broke with the following message.
evince: error while loading shared libraries: libz.so.1: cannot open shared object file: Error 20
The fix for this was:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install --reinstall zlib1g
This seems like a total mess and yet, both luatex and evince work now.
Published: Aug 17, 2026 @ 16:49.
Last Modified: Aug 19, 2026 @ 14:06.
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