The official Hangul Viewer app from Hancom for Linux likely will no longer be able to be installed if you've upgraded (most likely if you fresh installed) to the new 20.10 version of Ubuntu or other -buntu based distros.
Actually this problem apparently began in 19.04 but I only use LTS versions so I didn't notice it until I wiped my 18.04 install and upgraded. These newer versions drop support for certain older packages that the Hangul Viewer relies on. In fact they are removed from the repositories completely as newer versions have long superseded them.
Installing the Hangul Viewer in Ubuntu 20.10
So when you try to install the Viewer app as downloadable from the Hancom website, you get an installation error like this:
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| Error when installing Hancom HWP Viewer in Linux. Image: 유르무차의 자기개발서 |
There are many ways to open/view/edit Hangul files including on Linux (mostly via the web). But for me personally nothing really beats the ease and convenience of having a locally installed viewer app I can easily print from or copy from.
So can you still install the Hangul Viewer app?
Yes. But you'll need to manually install those older dependencies first.
Installing the older dependencies
The most glaring issue was that the Hangul Viewer installation failed due to the version of libwebkitgtk called for by the viewer app is version 3, which has been removed from the repositories and only version 4 remains (in fact libwebkit2gtk-4.0-37 came installed by default in my distro). Presumably if Hancom would update the viewer app to call this new source, it wouldn't be an issue but who knows when/if they ever will. So I figured simply installing the old version used in Bionic (18.04) which would be libwebkitgtk-3.0-0_2.4.11-3ubuntu3 would be enough. But it wasn't. Turns out there is a chain reaction of older dependencies I need. Now what?
Luckily thanks to a Korean language blog post, I figured it out. He had the same problem and discovered that you need to install a chain of older dependencies in a certain order to make the installation proceed smoothly.
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| The older dependencies needed, in the correct order [Left to Right]. Image: 유르무차의 자기개발서 |
So head over to an online repository of older packages (I used Ubuntu Updates) and download these needed packages. I've provided direct links to the Bionic packages for you:
Once you have downloaded and installed these packages in this order, you can then install the Hancom HWP Viewer app and it should be working again.
Big thanks to 유르무차 for posting about this tip.
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