HardInfo installation: 'error while loading shared libraries'

Q I installed HardInfo (the system profiler and benchmark app) on to my Ubuntu 8.04 system. When I run it from the command line I get "hardinfo: error while loading shared libraries:

libsoup-2.2.so.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"

Yet locate libsoup shows

/usr/lib/libsoup-2.4.so.1
/usr/lib/libsoup-2.4.so.1.1.0
/usr/share/doc/libsoup2.4-1
/usr/share/doc/libsoup2.4-1/AUTHORS
/usr/share/doc/libsoup2.4-1/NEWS.gz
/usr/share/doc/libsoup2.4-1/README
/usr/share/doc/libsoup2.4-1/changelog.Debian.gz
/usr/share/doc/libsoup2.4-1/copyright

A HardInfo requires version 2.2 of libsoup, and it looks like you have the later 2.4 installed. HardInfo is included in the Ubuntu repositories and can be installed directly from Synaptic. When you try to do this, it picks up on the dependency on libsoup2.2 and installs that too. So the solution to your problem is to either install HardInfo with Synaptic, or at least install libsoup2.2 from there. Libsoup 2.4 is not simply a newer version of the library: it's a different version that is not backward-compatible with 2.2. This keeps the code clean and compact because it is not burdened with legacy code and functions, but it means it will not work with programs that were written specifically for libsoup 2.2. This is not a problem as long as you are aware of the situation, because you can have both versions installed and programs can then use the version they need.

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