For Debian Users, LIBC 2.11 was pulled on testing (aka squeeze) repository.

Oh, I'm definitely looking for trouble.


Don't joke. The last company I worked at only fully supported building on RH 7.2 as late as 2008 (they were slowly migrating toward RHEL5 for the base developer workstation).

Finally, I leave you all with this. (Be extra sure to read the mouse-over.)

just for the files. gentoo now has 2.11 in stable. pre installed lib32 stuff is working fine with it. just to let you know who did not dare to install such a vital lib from unstable.

Well, it's stable on amd64, anyway. Still waiting on x86, though I suspect it'll be soon. :)

Edit: And now stable on x86, too. Woo!

While I much rather have a linux binary; I'm finding the game runs fairly well with wine (ubuntu 8.04). This is with a desktop; haven't tried with a netbook (bit concern the atom might lack the muscles but won't know till I try).

Well I for one would like to see a lower spec build done, the distro of my choice, PcLinuxOS, is a rolling distro and has the "glibc 2.11" problem.

Does not seem to be too high on anyone's list for a fix at the moment, although eventually, I would imagine, this will be addressed by the distro being updated at some stage, until then I am left hanging, not a good way to get customers to come back again.

I don't run windows, I don't own a Mac and I don't use *buntu, I guess I'm not going to be happy anytime soon, at least about paying for a game that I can not run.

I do realise and appreciate the effort put into both the game and the various distro's that abound us, and I applaud BW for the mighty effort of both books so far, and am aware of the kinds of pressure that is involved in these things, however having bought a game that seems to require me to change my distro of choice I'm not so happy about.

If nothing else let people know the system requirements (I have just checked the download path/s and at no time is there any mention of needing to be running Ubuntu or a distro with bleeding edge libs).

BW has said that he'll provide a build based on Ubuntu 9.x, which should open the app up to practically everything. That was originally gonna be a week or two ago, but I'd guess that other pressing concerns have taken precedence. Here's hoping that the 1.04-final build will have that change!

I don't have the build files so I'm not sure if this will work but what about statically linking to libc. It would add about 2M to a download that is already about 275M.

I think this would work - http://statifier.sourceforge.net/. I didn't read too much about it, but I hope you can do it just for specific libraries. Adding all of the dependencies to the executable would be pretty messy.

You could also just download a copy of the necessary libc and load it instead of your system's default one using LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

Static link to libc usually (not always, but usually is a problematic thing) Why ?
In a lot of case program uses not only glibc but also functions from libnss_* libraries
Translation uid to username and back, ip address to hostname and back and a number of others implemented by those libnss_* libraries
Those libraries (at least on all systems that I saw) are shared only, there is no ready available .a libraries. So there is no [easy] way to statically link them too.
Those libraries tightly coupled with libc. Using libc from one version and libnss_* libraries from another often produce undesirable results (segfault at best, hard to understand and debug problems at worst)

Statifier pack into executable ALL of it's shared libraries. You can ask some more libraries to be packaged using LD_PRELOAD, but there is no way to exclude libraries from packaging by statifier

Commercial alternative to statifer - Ermine (http://magicErmine.com) indeed able to pack only executable and libc, but it's commercial.

Bring another libc and using LD_LIBRARY_PATH is a nice idea and should work - as long as ld-linux.so.2, which is too tightly coupled with libc is not too different.

I have had this game for 4 months and I'm itching to play it. Is there a solution for people with Ubuntu 9.10 yet? Is there a way to install libc6 2.11 easily or will there be a build of Eschalon II that has a lower libc6 requirement?

At this point, probably not. We compiled the game on Ubuntu 10.04, which is the most recent Long Term Support edition. Most likely we will stay with this version through the release of our next game.

I mean absolutely no disrespect by asking this question, but why not just update your Ubuntu? It's extremely easy to do and you'll ensure future compatibility with more software.

I've never upgraded Ubuntu as I've read of a lot of people breaking their install that way. Usually I do a fresh install and that takes a little time, which I'm usually short of. Ubuntu 9.10 is running great for me right now and it's now just over 1 year old (10.04 is just 7 months old, compare that to XP) so I just didn't see much use in installing a newer version that may not run as well and that I'd have to spend time to install software. I have quite a bit of software that's not easily installed through synaptic and is a bit more involved to get set up just right. In any case, no big deal, I'm sure I'll upgrade at some point and play the game then. I guess if I don't have the time to reinstall Ubuntu, I don't have the time to play games very much right now.

Well, let me just say that I finished the game on Ubuntu 9.10 using obiwan's method described here. Why don't you give it a try?

edit: and yes, some Ubuntu upgrades I made were really painful experiences... some broken things get fixed, some things get broken every time...

Oh dear. So all the other distros that don't break at every update get left in the cold?
Please consider using a "stable" distro please BW, don't want to go through all this palaver again.