Can I run SW on RHLE if it was built on Ubuntu

1

I built a qt application on Ubuntu karmic. I transferred the binary to a red hat Linux enteprise 5.3 system and when I click on the program it doesn't do anything. Are they compatible or am I forgetting something? both computers run a quad-core 64bit cpu

user16654

Posted 2010-03-01T21:35:19.243

Reputation: 823

1Instead of clicking the program, try executing it from the command line and see if you get any errors. – jonescb – 2010-03-01T21:49:34.047

yeah thanks, it did say its looking for libQtGUI.so.4 – user16654 – 2010-03-01T22:02:24.670

Answers

4

Generally, no. You can of course recompile if you have the source code. The reason this fails could be one of several things, but generally applications fail to transfer from one to the other because they are linked to dynamic libraries that are not provided by the other platform. ("Not provided" here can also mean "provides the wrong version", or "provided, but not in the expected place" in addition to "just not there".)

If you build a static binary, chances are much better that it will run, because it doesn't depend on external libraries. That's not a guarantee -- you could still end up with a binary that won't run on the other platform due to kernel incompatibilities or other problems.

If you run the program on the commandline, you should get an error message that will help you determine exactly why it fails to run.

quack quixote

Posted 2010-03-01T21:35:19.243

Reputation: 37 382

yeah, debian (from which ubuntu is derived) does some tricks with parallel lib versions that as far as I know fedora does not bother with, so I would hardly expect portability in that direction, at least. – Justin Smith – 2010-03-01T23:05:01.040

0

Well, you probably need to install QT (the gui library from Troll Tech) that KDE is based on. Just keep trying until it works, install the library (which is easy enough with yum, probably, perhaps you will need to make a sym link from the version it wants to the version you have.

Ronald Pottol

Posted 2010-03-01T21:35:19.243

Reputation: 641

Even if I do that it is not enough. The gcc versions being used on both distros are different. I had to build on RHEL. – user16654 – 2010-06-28T17:45:13.950