Re: Unix software

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Sat, 15 Jan 2000, Iain Conochie wrote:

> > > Can anyone tell me what has to be done to get Unix programs to run
> > >on Linux?
> > Very little . .
> Sorry, but I am curious. Does this mean that you can run other Unix
> binaries, or do you have to recompile the source?

Bit of both, really. *BSD users will delight in telling you how they can
run Linux binaries .. it's a question of architecture, really. The main
reason that a (trad) UNIX binary won't run under Linux is because the
architectures are generally different - SPARC, MIPS, etc. The secondary,
albeit still large ;), problem is the exec loaders. But this can be
munged. For example, people have gotton Internet Explorer to run under
Linux by fiddling with the Sun version. It's doable, although generally
not something you want to try without a lot of expertise.

So the answer really is, you have to recompile. Which, these days, isn't a
great chore. I've just taken a piece of software from my (little endian)
machine and compiled it on an SGI IRIX platform (big endian, as well as
many other differences ;). Compiled fine - a ./configure did the lot.

Cheers,

Alex.

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