On Dec 18, 2007 10:02 PM, Dave Carlson <thecubic at thecubic.net> wrote: > This has always worked - from the most formal of distributions to Linux From > Scratch. If the libraries are available and similar enough, it works fine. Libraries are the key here. Most Linux binary programs are dynamic binaries and require various libraries to be available on your system. This makes the compiled binary small. If this sounds familiar, Windows + DLL. :) You can run into library issues on Linux the same as you would on Windows, but you usually don't as the source is out there and it's usually easy to build source with the latest versions of the library, assuming said library hasn't evolved to the point where the various calls to the library have changed completely, which in truth can, does, and will happen in the OSS world. Commercial software on Linux is often statically linked so that the resulting binary doesn't depend on the libraries that it was compiled against. This produces a bigger binary, but odds of the binary working usually go up. As was mentioned, some software includes the versions of the libraries it with the software. If you were to try running your Fedora GNOME binaries under a Ubuntu server install, odds are it wouldn't work unless you started installing dependencies for that binary on Ubuntu, and if you started with a bare minimum Ubuntu server install you would be installing a lot of packages... :) -- Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://andy.zibnet.us SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue >0; 0 rows returned