Your best bet I fear might be to try and build FreeSurfer
      yourself on your specific distro of Ubuntu. 

      

          https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/ReadOnlyCVS

      

      While not impossible (we have done this), it does require some
      detailed knowledge of Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular as
      you will have to resolve all the required dependencies and adapt
      the build commands accordingly. Still compiling your own
      FreeSurfer  will mean that there will be no library version
      conflicts which is what most likely will happen in the case of
      running the CentOS version on Ubuntu. And once you compile your
      own version from source, it will run on all your cluster nodes w/o
      issues.

      

      If you use a binary version (like the CentOS build), you would
      have to execute the instructions I presented (i.e. the synlinks) 
      on *every* cluster node.

      

      CentOS, like Ubuntu, is a distribution of Linux. That means that
      they are all Linux, but differ in the type and versions of various
      applications and libraries. CentOS is typically more conservative
      and generally has older versions of libraries than Ubuntu. Since
      the distributed FreeSurfer is dynamically compiled against the
      installation of CentOS at the NMR, it expects very specific
      version numbers on various system libraries. Usually these
      versions are no longer bundled on other more agile distributions
      like Ubuntu. Thankfully, it is usually sufficient to "trick" the
      various CentOS FreeSurfer apps on Ubuntu by simply making a
      symbolic from an existing system library to the name/version the
      FreeSurfer app expects. This is a "hack" and not guaranteed to
      always work. Having said that, the CentOS build of FreeSurfer
      works fine on Ubuntu 14.04+ using the link commands I listed
      earlier.

      

      All you need to do is Just download the CentOS version and try
      those link command. Although, I'm not 100% sure about Ubuntu
      12.04. As I said, those link instructions are valid for Ubuntu
      14.04 and above, so your mileage might vary. Also, you will need
      to have root access on each machine that you want to run those
      commands on. In the case of a cluster, this would mean running
      those command (as sudo) on *all* cluster nodes.  Unless you are
      the cluster administrator, this might be difficult (or impossible)
      to do.

      

      It might be that the best option for you is to roll your own
      FreeSurfer by compiling it from source in your environment.

      

      HTH

      -=R
-- 
Rudolph Pienaar, M.Eng, D.Eng / email: rudolph@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu
MGH/MIT/HMS Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging
149 (2301) 13th Street, Charlestown, MA 02129 USA