Applies to Ubuntu Karmic. I believe all these steps are not necessary anymore for newer versions of MySQL Workbench and newer distributions of Ubuntu.

  1. Download the package mysql-workbench-oss-5.1.16-16-1-i386.deb, or other version from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/5.1.html

  2. Install some necessary packages with

sudo apt-get install liblua5.1-0 libzib1
  1. Install MySQL Workbench with
dpkg -i mysql-workbench-oss-5.1.16-16-1-i386.deb
  1. Because of the bug create a symbolic link with
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libmysqlclient_r.so.16.0.0 /usr/lib/libmysqlclient_r.so

or

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libmysqlclient_r.so.15.0.0 /usr/lib/libmysqlclient_r.so