[Xastir] libWand.so.10 missing

[Curt, WE7U]

On Thu, 7 May 2009, Curt, WE7U wrote:

> On Thu, 7 May 2009, Denton K. Larson wrote:
>
>> I used to use Ubuntu 8.10, I recently and it worked GREAT!
>> I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 and I have a problem with Xastir.
>
> Are you trying to load an Xastir binary that was compiled for 8.10?
> If so, you need to find a binary that was compiled for 9.04, or else
> do the "configure;make;make install" for the Xastir sources to
> compile a new version of Xastir yourself that matches your
> libraries.

I feel that I should perhaps explain a little more.  If you're
familiar with ".dll" files on Windows, on Linux/Unix the ".so" files
are equivalent.  You might also see ".a" files which are in a
similar category but used slightly differently.

Anyway...   .dll's and .so's are libraries of compiled code.  When
you compile a Linux application the compiler uses .h (header) files
to tell it what's in the .so files.  When you tell the operating
system to run the program it actually links the program to the .so
files to create a complete executable in memory before it starts it
running.  What this means is that you need the exact same (or
compatible) version of the shared libraries present on the system
that the executable was compiled to use, else the operating system
can't do that final link to create a working program just before it
runs.

Make sense?

You get the same problem if you swap DLL's to incompatible versions
on Windows systems.

There are ways around this problem but they involve statically
compiling in the ".a" versions of libraries (if they exist) to the
program, making the program VERY large.  It's typically not done
except in very special circumstances (like the LSB version of
Xastir).

-- 
Curt, WE7U.				archer at eskimo dot com
http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
   Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
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