After upgrading from Ubuntu 11.10 to 12.04 I found gimp couldn’t access the shared libraries it needed, most likely an error with symbolic links as described by lovelyindia in this post.

He managed to fix the issue by removing gimp and purging the offending libraries and then letting apt deal with [...]]]>

After upgrading from Ubuntu 11.10 to 12.04 I found gimp couldn’t access the shared libraries it needed, most likely an error with symbolic links as described by lovelyindia in this post.

Fix 1:

He managed to fix the issue by removing gimp and purging the offending libraries and then letting apt deal with the libraries when he re-installed gimp, as per the below commands:

While this is likely to work for most people encountering this issue, it didn’t for me.

Fix 2:

Then I remembered I had used the repogen source list generator, in which I chose to include the gimp svn build. While you may not have gone about it the same way, you may also have a different repository in your sources.list file which is causing this issue, if the previous method did not resolve the issue.

In order to fix this, I had to open the sources.list file and comment out the offending repo.

Now search for any reference to gimp, in my case this was the lines I changed:

I commented out the line linking to the repo by adding a ‘#’ to the front, as below:

I then uninstalled gimp, once I knew it may have been the newly added repository that I had added:

Then I saved and exited the file and updated apt:

I then re-installed gimp:

This solved the issue for me, I hope this helps!

Download and install the associated package to your processor from here : https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/oneiric/+package/python-openal

Restart your computer and the issue should now be resolved.