Almost all of my experience is in Windows development but I need to port an application to Linux. The problem I'm having is how do I make binaries that will work across all the different distributions?

In particular, it seems to be glibc that is causing me problems. Everything else I need I can link against statically. But if I build my app on, say, Redhat 7.1 I can't run it on 6.2 because it requires glibc 2.2. It doesn't seem to matter whether I link glibc statically or dynamically.

And then what happens if I build on Redhat and my customer is running Debian? I haven't yet tried this but I recall reading somewhere that those distributions aren't binary compatible.

This probem has to have been solved. How do commercial vendors release software in binary form? Am I going to have to maintain build and test environments for every possible flavor of Linux? Please say it ain't so!

-Dylan

Almost all the apps I've got on my linux box that didn't come as part of the distro came as source, in fact the only time I've ever had problems was when I was given software in binary form. I'm assuming this software you're porting is closed source?

Are you sure that you linked it statically? Run ``ldd progname'' to make sure.