Oddly with Suse Tumbleweed, I got the same libfreetype.so error when updating to calibre 7.19. I located the libfreetype install in /usr/lib64 and while a link for libfreetype.so.6 existed, one for libfreetype.so did not. I used
Code:
cp -P libfreetype.so.6 libfreetype.so
to copy the libfreetype.so.6 link to libfreetype.so. This required elevation.
Code:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 Oct 11 2023 libfreetype.so -> libfreetype.so.6.20.1
After that link was created, calibre's install went without issue.
A test on Debian 12 Bookworm gave much the same result except the link was in /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu. Ditto for a Linux Mint 22 & Ubuntu 24.04 while Fedora 40 used /usr/lib64. NixOS was it's usual mess needing multiple installs. After I got calibre 7.19 installed, I removed the NixOS VM.
Edit: I also tried to change libfreetype.so in the linux-installer.sh to libfreetype.so.6 and the install went without error even where I removed the libfreetype.so link. Not sure if this would have any effect on running calibre though it did seem to come up okay but I did not do anything else.