Binary compatibility
Posted Jul 10, 2009 18:31 UTC (Fri) by
anton (subscriber, #25547)
In reply to:
Small problem for Linux ? Sure. Big problem for Linux user? Of course. by nye
Parent article:
Google Chrome OS and the community
Yes, my binary of Mosaic 2.7b5 still works on my Debian Lenny AMD64
system, and it also understands current HTTP (but often likes to
download instead of display HTML pages due to charset issues (IIRC)).
The binary is from 1998 and is statically linked.
A Mosaic binary from 1994 just segfaults, as well as all the other
ZMAGIC binaries (1994-1995) I have lying around.
The QMAGIC binaries (1995-1997) all report "can't load dynamic
linker '/lib/ld.so nor /usr/i486-linux/lib/ld.so'" and could probably
be made to work by copying the appropriate file to the right place
(plus any libraries needed).
Then we get into the ELF era (since 1998), and the binaries (e.g.,
ssh 1.2.25) work if (compatible versions of) the libraries they use
are present; for that ssh binary the libraries are libnsl.so.1
libcrypt.so.1 libutil.so.1 libc.so.6 /lib/ld-linux.so.2, which came
with the libc6-i386 package on Lenny. Not bad.
I usually preserve old distributions I used to use, so I can easily
copy the old libraries to my new distribution if I need them (or maybe
just include the old library directories in ld.so.conf). I have not
needed to do that for quite some time, though.
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