Re: ELF-Linux

[turnbull@example.com (Stephen J. Turnbull)]

>>>>> "Venkatesh" == Venkatesh RAGHAVAN <raghavan@example.com> writes:

    Venkatesh> Hello, I recently received a GIS software from
    Venkatesh> internet. The README text says that the program works
    Venkatesh> only on ELF Linux.  Will someone tell me what is ELF
    Venkatesh> Linux ?  Thanks

ELF is a binary executable format.  There are two in use on Linux
systems, a.out (the old format) and ELF (the new format, which has a
number of advantages for systems programmers).

Almost certainly your kernel supports ELF.  (I think all the 1.2.x
kernels do.)  Unless you got one without ELF support compiled in, but
I think all the major distributions give you ELF support.  The other
thing you need is ELF shared libraries.

To find out what libraries your system uses, you can use the ldconfig
program:

# /sbin/ldconfig -p
39 libs found in cache `/etc/ld.so.cache' (version 1.7.0)
	 1 - DLL libvga.so.1 => /lib/libvga.so.1.1.7
	 2 - ELF libtermcap.so.2 => /lib/libtermcap.so.2.0.0
	 3 - DLL libss.so.1 => /lib/libss.so.1.0

and 36 more libs after that in my case.  DLL is a hand-built a.out
shared (dynamically linked) library, ELF is an ELF shared library.
(Which is relatively easily built, compared to the a.out DLLs; that's
why they are changing to ELF.)

If you see lots of ELF libraries there, just fire up the new
programs.  They should work.

If you don't have at least an ELF libc.so.xxx and and ELF libm.so.xxx,
there's no hope.  You need to get new system libraries.  Probably you
have an ELF system if you've gotten a recent Slackware distribution.
If not it's may be easier to start from scratch in a new partition
with Slackware's ELF system or something like that; JWT or one of
those guys may be able to give relatively simple directions on how to
add ELF libraries to a non-ELF system.  (I recall having problems, but
that may have been in managing the GCC compiler plus the X libraries---
at that time there were no ELF X libraries, so I need both an ELF
compiler and an a.out compiler and that was a hassle.)

Steve