Question

Background:

At work I’m used to working on Solaris 10. We have sysadmins who know what they’re doing and can help out if required.

I’ve compiled things like apache, perl and mod_perl from source without any problems.

I’ve been given a redhat server to play with and am hitting problems. The sysadmins are out sick at the moment.

I keep hitting problems regarding LD_LIBRARY_PATH when building software. At the moment for test purposes I am compiling to my home directory, as I don’t have root, or permissions to install anywhere else.

I plan on having an area under /opt for us to install into, like we do on Solaris, but I’ll need out sysadmin around to create that for us.

My .bashrc had nothing for LD_LIBRARY_PATH so I’ve been appending things to that to get stuff built (e.g. ffmpeg from source). I’ve been reading about this and apparently this isn’t the way to go, it’s not reliable or something. I don’t have access to ldconfig (permission denied).

Now the quetions:

What is the best way to build applications under linux so that they won’t break? Creating entries under /etc/ld.so.conf.d/ ?

Can anyone give a brief overview of what LD_LIBRARY_PATH actually does?

Answer 1

From the ld.so(8) man page:

  LD_LIBRARY_PATH
          A colon-separated list of directories in which to search for ELF
          libraries at execution-time.  Similar to  the  PATH  environment
          variable.

But honestly, find an admin. Become one if need be. Oh, and build packages.