Init

During the last weeks I was wondering why the spell checking in the nativ Slack App (under Ubuntu 14.04) isn’t working at all. Finally I found some time to debug this issue.

After a short look into the logfile (/home/USERNAME/.config/Slack/logs/webapp-*.log) I saw following.

2016-11-15T17:07:27.274Z - info: 4 words typed without spell checking invoked, redetecting language
2016-11-15T17:07:27.287Z - info: Attempting detection, string length: 23
2016-11-15T17:07:27.290Z - info: Failed to load dictionary: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.20' not found (required by /usr/lib/slack/resources/app.asar.unpacked/node_modules/@paulcbetts/cld/build/Release/cld.node)
2016-11-15T17:07:27.296Z - info: 4 words typed without spell checking invoked, redetecting language

Funny to see that because I thought this app is statically compiled and has no external dependencies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Solution

After searching around the solution was relatively trivial. You have to add the Toolchain test builds ppa and install / upgrade libstdc++6.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install libstdc++6

After restarting the Slack app spell checking works as expected.

Sources

• http://askubuntu.com/questions/575505/glibcxx-3-4-20-not-found-how-to-fix-this-error
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16605623/where-can-i-get-a-copy-of-the-file-libstdc-so-6-0-15