I tried installing LAMMPS using the Windows installer from rpm lammps org /windows/LAMMPS-64bit-stable.exe today. Installing looks like it goes fine, but running lmp from the command line then gives an error that libpsl-5.dll cannot be found. Tried this on two different Windows 11 machines with identical results.
Moving to an older installer rpm lammps org windows/LAMMPS-64bit-29Aug2024_update4.exe windows/LAMMPS-64bit-29Aug2024_update4.exe got rid of the error on both machines.
Is this a known issue? Does anyone know if this is a kind of issue that can be reported in LAMMPS github issues?
EDIT (next day, after Alex already picked up on this bug report and fixed it): Removed all links from my post because an overly enthusiastic someone from the community flagged my post as spam / promotional.
I also tested the GUI, Python MSMPI, and the stable MSMPI.exe from the Windows binary repository on three separate computers. But I saw that it works fine until July 21, 2025. But when I try to open the version from 2025-09-10, I get the error “libpsl-5.dll cannot be found.”
LAMMPS-64bit-Python-22Jul2025-MSMPI.exe also works fine.
Thanks for checking and reporting back. It seems this error is dependent on the Linux version that I am building those packages on. Newer version have a different configuration for CURL and that includes an additional dependency that is not included into the installer.
Whether this triggers an error or not seems to depend on whether you have some other software installed that also uses CURL.
@wouterel@Durjoy_Sarkar_Dhrubo I have built and uploaded new packages to the download folder with an older Linux version. Can you please try one more time and let me know?
Before the next releases, I will work on improving the scripts for building the installer packages so they can handle the newer Linux versions.
FYI, you can just download the missing DLL files (there are three: libpsl-5.dll, libiconv-2.dll, and libunistring-5.dll), put them in the directory with the LAMMPS-GUI executable and it will work (at least on Win10).
I don’t know who or what is flagging my posts as spam but I would hope that the fact that Alex picked up on my report right away is enough proof that my posts are not spam.
I work with students. I don’t want to teach students unsafe habits such as downloading dll files from unvetted locations. Lots of malicious sites offer them.
The forum software blocks posts with multiple URLs to the same domain as a heuristic for spam since spam messages often have this.
This the same reason why new users cannot attach files or the very first post needs approval. Just don’t worry and give me time to wake up (I am at the US East Coast) so I can process the moderation queue.
Alright. Apologies for reading too much into the message I got. It rather strongly suggested that a person flagged my message as spam. If the notification had made clear that this happened in an automated fashion I would definitely have been more patient.
I suspect that that may be intentional in the hope to scare off spammers. In the age of AI chatbots it is becoming difficult to detect spam with heuristics and tell spam apart from legitimate messages.
Overall, the system that the Materials Project folks (who run this form) have set up with Discourse (after some discussions with us as the busiest group in the forum) is quite effective. Especially sending the first post from “everybody” unconditionally to moderation has work better than any other heuristics, which often was blocking legitimate posts from long-time users and requiring more moderation effort and confusion. For now, it seems that LLMs are not good enough at generating meaningful and consistent messages for scientific topics
… and people like me are getting better as detecting “LLM-isms”.
Clear. Anyway, I hope the results of my installer checks this morning were what you were expecting. The two new installers I tried from rpm.lammps . org worked well.
