The VPN client Checkpoint has for their products is a royal pain in the ass to run, so probably you’ve found that the easier way to connect one of those systems is using their command line client (snx): it doesn’t rely on java or activex (yikes), it’s faster to install, it doesn’t nag you every other connection to update, you can open and close you browser without worries…

But if you’ve been updating your Ubuntu Linux to 14.04 or your Mint Linux to 17, you might have found this error:

~  snx
snx: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

This is because snx is compiled using gcc 3, instead of the very common version 4 right now, so you need to install libstdc++5. But that’s not enough, lets check its dependencies:

~  sudo ldd /usr/bin/snx
    linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xf774d000)
    libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libX11.so.6 (0xf75f3000)
    libpthread.so.0 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0xf75d7000)
    libresolv.so.2 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libresolv.so.2 (0xf75be000)
    libdl.so.2 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libdl.so.2 (0xf75b9000)
    libpam.so.0 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libpam.so.0 (0xf75aa000)
    libnsl.so.1 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libnsl.so.1 (0xf7591000)
    libstdc++.so.5 => not found
    libc.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0xf73e1000)
    libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxcb.so.1 (0xf73bf000)
    /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf774e000)
    libaudit.so.1 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libaudit.so.1 (0xf739a000)
    libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libXau.so.6 (0xf7396000)
    libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libXdmcp.so.6 (0xf738f000)

As you can see, all the dependencies are 32 bit (i386), so, you need to install the specific 32 bit version of that library, this way:

~ apt-get install libstdc++5:i386

Then, said message should go away and let you connect. In case you are missing any other library, remember installing the 32 bit version appending the ‘:i386’ part to the name of the package.

Good luck!