this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2026
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Nope, can't find this ancient version of libc!
You can still compile it against the modern version.
And if it's static linked it will either run or you can ask Linus to murder someone for you.
Hmm I'll email Linus
I was trying to compile the first version of SuperTuxKart just for fun, how naive I were... Nowadays it's like translating ancient runes and good luck finding those ancient libraries
If I may, is there a way to quickly and easily have a disposable/revertible environment for building? For Fedora specifically. It's annoying to install a whole suite of packages because I need them just this once and then either manually delete the ones I didn't manually install before and actually need or just live with a whole bunch of devel packages that'll never be used again
Distrobox might be the easiest way. If you use a custom HOME directory you can even keep the build artefacts isolated.
You can use docker for that. I think there are even some tools to make it easier to use for that use case, but I just use plain docker for it
It's funny because that's true that an old Linux binary is likely to have issues under Linux, but an similarly old Windows application might work better under Wine on Linux than modern Windows.
libc is actually relatively less likely, glibc is awfully conservative about changes, but there are a maze of likely service and library dependencies that were abandoned or didn't regard backwards compatibility with the same importance.