Installing old Ubuntu (4.10) on old hardware to run an old program

[frisket]

Sorry, to reply directly to that: on later systems, if I install 32-bit support, it still doesn’t go back far enough as it only adds ld-linux.so.2 not the so.1 that my binary requires.

[frisket]

Thanks very much, I did that and was able to install Emacs

The libraries I got from running ldd on the binary on a modern system:

linux-gate.so.1  -- this is apparently a virtual thing so how do I make it appear?
libX11.so.6  -- already installed 
LibXt.so.6  -- already installed
libm.so.5 -- I can't find where to get this
libc.so.5 -- I can't find where to get this

I obviously need to do something to some configuration somewhere (ld.so?) to enable linux-gate.so.1 but I don’t know what.

At the moment, ldd on the target (Hardy) does not work at all on the binary, claiming the binary does not exist (a known symptom of missing libraries, I believe).

[frisket]

I’m slowly making progress getting Hardy to do something meaningful, but I may have to come back to Warty eventually.

Boxes appears to be Gnome, which I don’t use, so it presumably needs to install a ton and a half of Gnome packages, so I’ll hold off on that for a while, thanks.

[popey]

Warty “works” with qemu-system-i386 (from the qemu-system-x86 package) that’s in Ubuntu 24.04.

qemu-system-i386 -hda disk.qcow2  -m 2G -cpu pentium -vga cirrus  -cdrom warty-release-install-i386.iso -boot d

Even the desktop works

However (the bad news), it ships with libm.so.6, not libm.so.5 that you’re looking for. Also, libc.so.6 which is symlinked to libc-2.3.2.so.

You may need to go further back, to before Debian 3.0.

[ubfan1]

I wouldn’t worry about the linux-gate.so.1. I have an old 2008 binary with that which runs fine on an Ubuntu 24.04 desktop. That binary’s ldd output shows libncurses.so.5 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.5 (0xf4479000), which I fixed by adding the link to the current libncurses6:
root root 17 Jun 19 2024 /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libncurses.so.5 → libncurses.so.6.4
To repeat myself, try just adding the missing old libraries as links to the current verersion on a current system.

[frisket]

My binary is 1999, so it would need a Linux from that era. I can’t remember what I was running at the time, possibly even Red Hat (ducks).

I’ll try the linking method this weekend, thanks. I wish it was possible to get ldd to report exactly why it reports the file missing when I type ldd p-stat in the directory where the file is. ldd -v has no effect.