Larry was not able to upgrade his system, so he cannot run the binary. I don't know why he couldn't, it's hard to figure this out over the phone on my end. But in perhaps a year or two from now your binary will stop working for the same reason on modern systems.rvida wrote:Static linking of glibc is not officially supported. Some even consider static linking in general as harmful.Don wrote: On Linux Critter does not run except on more recent Linux distributions - because it's dynamically liked. Larry is not able to run it because of that - and even though I can fix that for him it's going to be a pain for some users. Can you fix that?
Thanks,
Don
Easiest fix is upgrading the Linux distro. Most of them have very painless automatic update systems anyway.
The arguments for dynamic linking appeal to me a lot but I'm a technical person, they don't mean squat to people who don't know what they are doing. All they see is that it "doesn't work" and they move on out of frustration.
I just want you to be aware of the issues - it's easy for us more technical people to assume that it should be no problem but it is. Larry will not be able to update glibc to 2.14 on his own, so on his own critter 1.6 is useless. If he upgrades Ubuntu he will have to learn how to use a completely different desktop - for you and I this is just an annoyance, for him it will be a real challenge and cost him hours. I don't believe Larry is able to upgrade or install on his own - as smart as he is he isn't interested in learning any more than he absolutely has to and he is easily confused. To be honest most of my installs involve some sort of pain, drivers that doesn't work and other nonsense and I'm an expert - so expecting him to be able to do this is not happening.
I'm not criticizing you - Critter is a gift and you have no obligation to anyone for anything but I just want to make sure you understand that not all users of Critter are at our level. Users of Linux are usually more technically oriented so you would think it's not a big deal, but it is.
Anyway, Larry does want to have critter on his machines and we are both huge fans of Critter. It's a several hour drive but I will update his OS one day when I have a couple days free for the trip so that I can install the more traditional cinnamon desktop too - and meanwhile I'll get glibc 2.14 installed so that he can use Critter.