Application Installation on older Linux versions

[GordonAkst]

I am developing applications on RHEL4 using wxGTK 2.8.8 and KDevelop 3.1.1. The apps compile, link, and run on the development computer.
My problem is that my customer wants the apps to run on many PC's with Fedora Core 2 OS. Customer cannot upgrade to newer Linux.
When I try to run the apps on Fedora 2, I get many missing dependencies mostly from links to development files that are not there. I tried to setup wxGTK and KDevelop for static libraries. That made my executables much bigger but didn't fix the dependency problems. Apparently not everything is static.
I started to install the required development packages on Fedora 2, but it seems to be a never-ending task. Seems too hard to do on many installs.
I am used to building Windows apps where you can just take the required DLL's with the exe.
In Linux, is there any way to force a fully static executable or a simpler way to solve the dependency problems??
Thanks for your help.
Gordon

[Auria]

Does wxGTK 2.8 even support such old versions of GTK? I'm not sure where to find the minimum supported GTK version of wxGTK, but this sounds like something you should check...


your best bet is probably to build the application on Fedora 2. Usually linux systems have package managers that make it easy to install dependencies - but I don't know about fedora 2, that's so old

[DavidHart]

Hi Gordon,

My problem is that my customer wants the apps to run on many PC's with Fedora Core 2 OS.

Wow! That's from May 2004!

Customer cannot upgrade to newer Linux.

Perhaps you need upgraded customers .

In Linux, is there any way to force a fully static executable or a simpler way to solve the dependency problems??

Basically, no. You'd have to statically link to gtk, which is difficult or impossible, and would probably breach the GPL anyway unless your app is itself GPLed.

Does wxGTK 2.8 even support such old versions of GTK?

I looked up FC2 in Distrowatch's fedora page. This says it comes with gtk+ 2.4.0; and grepping through the wxGTK-2.8.8 headers, there's a version check for gtk+ 2.1.1 (#if GTK_CHECK_VERSION(2, 1, 0)) so using <=wx2.8.8 isn't impossible.

I expected a 2005 distro to come with wxGTK-2.4.2, and that would have been a serious issue for you as the build system was different in those days: your app might not have been able to use wx-config. However, searching for FC2 rpms here found wxGTK2.6.3 as well (I'd guess that the 2.4.2 ones are the originals, but someone created 2.6.3 later). I can't link to the page, but go that url, tick the Fedora 2 box and search for 'wxGTK-devel'.

Seems too hard to do on many installs.

You're doing this in an FC2 partition or an FC2 guest, of course? If you become superuser and do:
yum install wxGTK-devel gcc-c++ rpm-build
I think you'll find everything else is added automatically. (I added rpm-build in case you're distributing your app as an rpm. If you're not, you can omit it.)

You'll then have a working wxGTK-2.6.3 on an FC2 system. It'll just be a matter of making your app work on it. That shouldn't be too difficult (not like it would have been on 2.4.2). Reading the changelog backwards might help .

Regards,

David

[GordonAkst]

Thanks; I'll try those ideas.