BitmapCake!

I have been using Tmux for some time with Ubuntu 16.04 and it was all working so well until I upgraded my system to Ubuntu 18.04. When I tried to run tmux via the command, it interrupted with an error as shown below:

tmux: error while loading shared libraries: libevent-2.0.so

So I checked a little bit deeper and found the solution to this. It seems like tmux in Ubuntu 18.04 requires the shown version of libevent and since I installed tmux under Ubuntu 16.04, I'm missing it. That's pretty obvious.

You should also note that Tmux comes with all the required libraries in Ubuntu repositories if you use Ubuntu 18.04. So in order to fix it, all you have to do is remove the version of tmux you already have and reinstall it.

First let's remove tmux.

sudo apt purge tmux*
This will remove all tmux related packages from your system. Now if you enter the command tmux in your terminal, you should get a message saying it's not installed. If it still shows the same error, then you have to manually remove tmux.

To see which tmux binary is used in your system, run the following command.

which tmux

It will display the path to tmux. You can remove it manually by running:

sudo rm $(which tmux)

Fine, now tmux is removed from your system. Now let's install it using apt.

sudo apt install tmux

After installing, you can start tmux by entering the tmux command in your terminal. If you get some error saying tmux is not found, then its probably because your system is still using the old path to tmux, which we deleted before.

To verify that, enter the following command.

type tmux

If you get a response something to similar to this :

tmux is hashed (/usr/local/bin/tmux)

Then it means you have to clear the old hash, so it will identify the new tmux path.

You can remove the hash by running the following command.

hash -d tmux

This will remove the hash entry and now if you again try to run tmux, it should work as expected.

I hope this will help somebody :) Feel free to comment and ask any questions.