libGLU.so.1 error loading shared library I am trying to install blender 2.79 on ubuntu 17.10.
Downloaded  blender-2.79-linux-glibc219-x86_64.tar.bz2 from 

https://www.blender.org/download/

ran the command: sudo tar xvjf blender-2.79-linux-glibc219-x86_64.tar.bz2

changed directories to the blender executable and ran the command:
 ./blender

Got this error:

./blender: error while loading shared libraries: libGLU.so.1:
 cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

If I run /sbin/ldconfig -p
I get the line:
libGL.so.1 (libc6,x86-64) =&gt; /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so.1

So I'm guessing I need to link to it somehow?
I tried
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so.1 /usr/lib
which didn't work, and maybe I've made things worse.

Any help would be appreciated.
I had the same issue. Running the libglu1 installation addressed this. I'm running Blender 2.79 on Ubuntu 16.04

sudo apt-get install libglu1