Old versions of Ubuntu (< than 22.04) are shipped with old versions of Qt, but MeshLab requires Qt 5.15. Therefore, you must install manually Qt separatelly in your system. You can then give the path of the Qt installation directory to the various scripts, or you can add Qt to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

The 0_setup_env.sh script won't install qt from apt if you pass the argument dont_install_qt.

Dependencies

Dependencies are automatically installed by the 0_setup_env.sh script, which uses apt-get as package manager. Be sure to have apt-get installed before running this script.

Libraries installed by the 0_setup_env.sh are the following:

Required by MeshLab:
- mesa-common-dev
- libglu1-mesa-dev
- cmake
- ninja-build
- patchelf (for deploy stage)
Required by Qt5:
- libxcb-icccm4-dev
- libxcb-image0-dev
- libxcb-keysyms1-dev
- libxcb-render-util0-dev
- libxcb-xinerama0-dev
Optional:
- libgmp-dev and libmpfr-dev (required by cgal)
- libxerces-c-dev (required by libe57)
- libcgal-dev and libboost-all-dev (required by several MeshLab plugins)

The script won't install cgal and boost (and then they will be downloaded by cmake during configuration) if you pass the argument --dont_install_cgal_and_boost.

Note about deployment and AppImage packaging on Linux

To deploy MeshLab and make it portable, we use the tool linuxdeploy. The authors of this tool suggest to use the last still-supported LTS version of Linux when deploying and generating an AppImage, in order to provide wide support of the application.