Unable to load shared library 'libdl.so' or one of its dependencies. In order to help diagnose loading problems, consider using a tool like strace.

The error with this specific error message is caused by some application or library code trying to PInvoke libdl.so directly, like this: https://github.com/Therzok/SQLitePCL.raw/blob/d86a5b5311ff4cdbba54cda49c23a776bd888663/src/cs/sqlite3_pinvoke.cs#L1255-L1257

The proper fix is change the offending code to call NativeLibrary.Load managed API that abstracts away the platforms and platform version differences in native library loading.

Linking libdl.so to libdl.so.2 is a fine workaround until the proper fix can be deployed.

You can simply create a symbolic link like so:

$ whereis libdl.so.2
libdl.so.2: /usr/lib/libdl.so.2 /usr/lib32/libdl.so.2
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libdl.so.2 /usr/lib/libdl.so
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib32/libdl.so.2 /usr/lib32/libdl.so

In my case that's enough for MonoGame.

TL;DR: This is a building issue with the application, the application was incorrectly built and linked against libdl.so. For Linux support, the software must be rebuilt and linked to libdl.so.2 instead.

In this specific stack trace, the crash is in the C# pythonnet stack, fixed in pythonnet >= 3.0

More Explanation:

This is the standard glibc library. It's often linked automatically when binaries are created or it's often hardcoded in specific builds (the library is used to load further libraries).

The library is libdl.so.2 in Linux distributions (Debian, RHEL, Ubuntu, etc...). It was historically libdl.so in older operating systems and Unix variants.

Both have been coexisting for a while and causing confusion:

• On CentOS, libdl.so can be installed by sudo yum install glibc-devel
• On Debian and Ubuntu <=20, libdl.so can be installed by sudo apt-get install libc6-dev
• On Ubuntu >= 22, libdl.so no longer exists, it can't be installed by libc6-dev (nor gcc).

The dev glibc package is a transitive dependency of gcc. It's very common for gcc to be installed on Linux machines (developer machines and end-user machines alike), so it's very common for libdl.so to be accidentally available. It's not part of the base operating system and should not be expected to be available.

Software that have been linked to libdl.so will crash when the library is not available. It's a long standing issue. It's getting more noticeable due to Ubuntu 22 lately, it was only noticeable in containers and minimal OS install before (no gcc).

In this specific stack trace, the crash was in the C# pythonnet stack, the linking was fixed in pythonnet >= 3.0