About a month ago I wiped my workstation and started fresh with a CentOS 7 minimal install. In the process of getting up and running, I needed to reinstall Autodesk Maya and all of the dependencies that go along with it. In order to expedite this process for myself in the future and for others, I whipped up a quick shell script that takes care of all of Maya’s dependencies.

While installing Maya’s dependencies, I learned that I was installing a plethora of unnecessary 32-bit packages by manually installing packages like so: yum -y install libpthreads.so.0. Instead I utilized two methods to figure out which 64-bit package to install from to obtain the correct library objects. The first is using the native package manager which has a nifty command called provides. By searching for a package using this command it will provide each instance of the package in the repositories currently enabled on your system.

$ yum provides libSM.so.6

libSM-1.2.2-2.el7.i686 : X.Org X11 SM runtime library
Repo : base
Matched from:
Provides : libSM.so.6

libSM-1.2.2-2.el7.i686 : X.Org X11 SM runtime library
Repo : @base
Matched from:
Provides : libSM.so.6

The other method is to search for the library using the RPMFind website. It is a very handy resource which I’ve used extensively over the years.

The odd thing about this is that the system dependency list in the Maya documentation is mostly comprised of 32-bit libraries. On a 64-bit system with a 64-bit application this is less than ideal. Having said that, I did a trial run and installed only the 64-bit variants of the libraries by not specifying .i686 as CentOS will by default install the system architecture version of an undefined package. So far Maya has had no issues and hasn’t complained about any missing dependencies, so I think it’s safe to say this approach works!

One thing to note is that I have used this script on a minimal install of CentOS after installing the GNOME desktop (yum -y groups install "GNOME Desktop") and NVIDIA graphics drivers, so depending on your setup things may be ever so slightly different. The install script is written for Maya 2018, but should work on any modern version of the application. If using a GUI environment, it should be executed before running the Maya Setup app.

The script is hosted on GitLab here: https://gitlab.com/snippets/1690538