The bad thing about Linux software…

If Linux software had the source code as an extra it would be great, as it turns out though you *need* the source code for anything to work!

I’m not sure how many people have ever run their own Linux system, but one thing that you find out quickly is that the reason the source code is distributed is not so much that they are doing a big favor to the world but is actually a requirement for things to work. The most recent case in point:

Mozilla 1.4RC2 Released

You basically have to have everything you use with Mozilla 1.4 compiled with a specific version of the compiler. When you run a Linux server you encounter this all the time — just recompile and everything will be fine. We have the same problems when running Jrockit on some custom blade servers. They touch the kernel and suddenly nothing works out of the box and you need a different binary for every little variant of Linux out there. The alternative is to abandon dynamic linking entirely. The Mozilla binaries ship like that but since plugins are still dynamically loaded they need to be compiled against the same exact set of libraries and the same compiler as Mozilla is built against.