How do I install libtiff.so.3?

Repositories for 16.04, 16.10, 17.04 and 17.10 have libtiff5 (most likely included in installation) which provides libtiff.so.5 but not libtiff.so.3. This causes problems for applications that look for libtiff.so.3 as detailed in this bug report

First do

sudo apt install libtiff5

You will likely find it is already installed. However, if not, see if this fixes the problem.

If not, try this workaround: To fool applications into using libtiff.so.5 instead of libtiff.so.3, you can create a symlink in the same directory named libtiff.so.3 pointing to libtiff.so.5. This may not work for all applications, since the libraries are not exactly the same.

To do this in a 32-bit system enter:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libtiff.so.5 /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libtiff.so.3

In a 64-bit system it would be:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtiff.so.5 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtiff.so.3

If unsure, you can find the library on your system like this:

locate -b libtiff

Then you will be able to get the path correct (if you just installed libtiff5, you have to first do sudo updatedb for locate to find it)

You're missing the TIFF library. apt-cache search libtiff shows packages, you'll need libtiff4:

sudo apt-get install libtiff4

I'm running in to the same error with a different program. I'm using Oneiric (Xubuntu 11.10)

$ sudo apt-get install libtiff3
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package libtiff3

Libtiff4 is already installed on this system, and clearly doesn't provide libtiff.so.3.

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libtiff.so.4 /usr/lib/libtiff.so.3

I couldn't find libtiff.so.4 there, but I did find it in /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/. So the command I ran was:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libtiff.so.4 /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libtiff.so.3

And it worked for the game I was trying to play (http://www.happypenguin.org/show?interLOGIC)