Cewe Photo Album Creator - new version does not work correctly. Can the community unravel the mystery?

[rbos]

Hi,

I recently wanted to make to a Photo album with the software from CEWE, link(s) below. I like this software as it supports Linux for a very long time, already since 2009. Their application is built with QT libraries. I’ve created quite some albums already.

However, their latest version 8.1.3 does not show the product page correctly (page remains blank/empty) and when ordering the product (after much labor) the page to fill in payment information remains blank/empty.

While their previous version(s) 8.0.5 just works.

I filed a complained and offered assistance debugging the issue, but until now no changes.

Now I wonder is the openSUSE community able to figure out what the issue is?

• I use openSUSE Slowroll.
• Is this a Slowroll issue?
• Is it an openSUSE issue, or
• do other (mainly (K)Ubuntu) distributions show the same issue. I assume they’ll as the software comes with their own QT-libraries.

As the app show issues when communicating with the upstream servers (at least that is what I think), to fetch the latest product information, or to fetch the order information it might be something with the communication…

The software comes as an small tgz file. Unpacked there is a EULA.txt and an install.pl file.
Just run the ./install.pl and that will install the software to your directory of choice. The installation downloads additional files.

Use ‘./install.pl --help’ for help.

Afterwards the application directory can just be removed (perhaps there is even an uninstall option, that may be needed for the desktop file and icons).

To obtain the previous version, change this line:
my $HPS_VER = '8.1.3';
to
my $HPS_VER = '8.0.5';

Start the application, one of the first things it want to do, is to show the products that can you use with your photos. But with this version the page remains blank

If the ‘–easy’ argument is used, the application continues…

Just wondering if other openSUSE users encounter the same issue, or is it just mine instance? Are we together able to determine what’s happening.

Is it perhaps possible to copy library from the previous version, to make the current one work?

1. GB: https://www.cewe.co.uk/creator-software.html → install software
2. DE: https://www.cewe.de/bestellsoftware.html → download software
3. NL: https://www.cewe.nl/bestelsoftware.html → download software

Regards,

[shundhammer]

A click on that “creator-software.html” page led to a download of a .tgz file (a compressed tar achive) with this content:

[sh @ meteor] ...~/tmp/cewe 2 % ls -l
total 16
-rw-r--r-- 1 sh users 16161 Sep  6 23:17 setup_CEWE_Creator.tgz
[sh @ meteor] ...~/tmp/cewe 3 % tar tvf setup_CEWE_Creator.tgz 
-rw-r--r-- www-data/www-data 10052 2026-08-28 07:19 EULA.txt
-rwxr-xr-x www-data/www-data 48073 2026-09-06 23:17 install.pl
[sh @ meteor] ...~/tmp/cewe 4 % tar xvf setup_CEWE_Creator.tgz
EULA.txt
install.pl
[sh @ meteor] ...~/tmp/cewe 5 % head -n 20 install.pl 
#! /usr/bin/perl -w
################################################################################
#
# Linux Installations Script
#
################################################################################

use strict;

use Cwd;
use Cwd 'abs_path';
use File::Basename;
use File::Copy;
use File::Find;
use File::Path qw(make_path);
use Getopt::Long;

################################################################################
#
# Einige Konfigurationskonstanten

This Perl script builds URLs to put into wget that downloads some stuff from somewhere. This is where I stopped experimenting; I don’t have that level of trust in whatever they do.

What I couldn’t find was any system requirements, in particular what Qt version they need. If they’d provide an RPM, we could query that RPM for the exact requirements.

Maybe they do actually have a download directory with RPMs (and probably Debian/Ubuntu .deb) packages. If you find something, we can try to help you from there.

It would be more reassuring if they stated exactly what distros in what version they support, and what library packages (most importantly what Qt lib packages) they require. But I don’t have the patience to decipher that Perl script to find out such stuff that they should simply tell their users - without reverse engineering.

[shundhammer]

https://share.google/aimode/nLO5sRpmM2Rnt05Pc

AI Overview

The recent versions of the CEWE photobook software (such as Version 8.x) require Qt 6 (specifically Qt 6.5.0 or newer), as indicated by startup error logs requiring libxcb-cursor0 introduced in Qt 6.5, while older versions relied on Qt 5

Current Slowroll has Qt 6.11.1, so that should work just fine.

[shundhammer]

@rbos

Is it perhaps possible to copy library from the previous version, to make the current one work?

Don’t do that; it will end in certain disaster.

[rbos]

@shundhammer did you run the app?
Does it work for you?

Anybody else, that tried it?

[shundhammer]

@rbos

@shundhammer did you run the app?

No, because that script does things that I’d have to reverse-engineer first to make a decision whether or not I trust it enough.

They should really distribute their software as a Flatpak with all the correct shared libs included. I suspect they attempt to do something similar, but I didn’t spend the time to dive that deep into it.