I have not tried the FS 5.3 binaries on an Ubuntu 20 system, but I suspect some shared library references won’t be resolved there. Even if the FS 5.3 source were to compile on Ubuntu 20, you would likely get some discrepancy in numeric output because of the differences in compilers and libraries. If you still need to work with FS 5.3 on a newer OS like Ubuntu 20, then you could run the FS 5.3.3 binaries on an older OS like CentOS 6 inside a virtual machine (VM) or container hosted on your Ubuntu 20 system. VirtualBox is a popular (and free) VM host that runs on most OS's.

The latest freesurfer 7.1.1 release has installers and binary archives you can download for CentOS 6, 7 and 8. I believe the CentOS 7 binaries run on Ubuntu 18 (but I have not tried them on Ubuntu 20), Those downloads can be found at, https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/rel7downloads

We do build the Freesurfer development 7.X.X branch on Ubuntu 18, so you could try those binaries on Ubuntu 20. Because they are from the development branch, the binaries have not been tested like a release. But I think binary backwards compatibility should work on Ubuntu 20 for binaries built on Ubuntu 18. You can download the development archive in a browser via the link, MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "secure-web.cisco.com" claiming to be https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/pub/dist/freesurfer/dev/freesurfer-linux-ubuntu18_x86_64-dev.tar..gz

- R.

On Dec 17, 2020, at 10:10, Olga Kepinska <olga.kepinska@univie.ac.at> wrote:

External Email - Use Caution

Dear colleagues,

I am looking for information about installing FS on Ubuntu 20.04.
One concern is that we might need to be able to use an older version of FS (e.g. FS 5.3), and from what we can tell that won't even be compatible with Ubuntu 18.04, see: MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "secure-web.cisco.com" claiming to behttps://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/DownloadAndInstall5.3

Centos is not an option for us as it will not be supported by our institution from 2021.

Thank you in advance,
Olga Kepinska

--
Olga Kepinska, PhD 
Postdoctoral Researcher
Brain and Language Lab (MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "secure-web.cisco.com" claiming to be http://www.brainandlanguagelab.org)
@olgakepinska
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