WaterWaiver, 11 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

A method I have not seen mentioned yet (for when you have an old precompiled version of an app):

1. Identify the missing libs. You can run the program, but sometimes it’s easier to use ldd
2. Use your web browser to download the missing libs from Debian’s repos (stable or older if need be). Unfortunately you often also have to grab their deps too.
3. Extract the .debs
4. Move all of the .so files into the same folder as the old program you are trying to run
5. export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$(pwd)"
6. Now try running the app

It often takes a bit of fiddling, but it’s worked for me a few times and you only need to fetch the few libraries you are missing. For bigger things however it can be a dependency hell, you might as well use the distro’s actual package manager inside a chroot.

Note: You don’t need to be using Debian as your host distro, I don’t. As long as it’s a glibc based distro you should be mostly fine (glibc is mostly backwards compatible)