Thursday, January 10, 2013

Running Bundler on Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit

This post is mostly a note to myself so that I remember how to do this next time I upgrade or reinstall my system. But, perhaps it will be of use to others.

The program Bundler is one of a suite of programs that are very useful for photogrammetry on the desktop computer or laptop. Being a devoted Linux user, it's important to me to be able to run my software where and how I want it. Unfortunately, Bundler does not play well in 64-bit Linux (I am running Ubuntu 12.04-64 right now, in support of processing large data sets), generating segmentation faults upon attempts to execute. This is a fairly well-known problem (I found three or four pages mentioning this), but it can be tough to track down the solution. Fortunately, I found it here. What follows is essentially a short list of what I did to fix the error (with a general description of how I set up my system).


  • Set up BundlerTools (a package including Bundler and other programs necessary for photogrammetry), using scripts at the BundlerTools website. I installed it into my home folder ("home/username/BundlerTools").
  • Per the directions here, I installed ia32-libs and liblapack3gf:i386. The first one was already installed, just as a note. Code was:
    • sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
    • sudo apt-get install liblapack3gf:i386
  • Then, following these directions, I copied libANN_char.so (found in BundlerTools/lib) to my /usr/lib folder, and made the file executable. Commands were:
    • sudo cp /home/username/BundlerTools/bin/libANN_char.so /usr/lib/
    • sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib/libANN_char.so
  • And that did the trick!
To run Bundler, I navigate to the directory where I have all of my images. Then, I use the command:
  • /home/username/BundlerTools/run.pl --resize-to 200
    • [or resize to whatever size you want - I set it small for a very quick test run; thus, it could be 200, 1200, 2400, 6000, or whatever size is desired]