ROSA Marathon is included in the Linux Application Checker knowledge base

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As an example usage, one can see that the Firefox build downloaded from http://mozilla.org (of the version 19.0.2 at the moment of writing this article) cannot be used in old systems such as Fedora 10 or Ubuntu 9.04.
 
As an example usage, one can see that the Firefox build downloaded from http://mozilla.org (of the version 19.0.2 at the moment of writing this article) cannot be used in old systems such as Fedora 10 or Ubuntu 9.04.
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[[File:LinuxAppChecker_for_firefox.png|640px|center]]
 
[[File:LinuxAppChecker_for_firefox.png|640px|center]]

Latest revision as of 14:40, 24 September 2013

The Linux Foundation consortium has announced an updated version (4.1.8) of the Linux Application Checker (AppChecker) — a tool aimed to analyze compatibility of applications with different Linux distributions and check their compliance with Linux Standard Base (LSB). Currently AppChecker database for the x86 platform contains data about 84 distributions, now with ROSA 2012 Marathon among them. We are going to continue our collaboration with Linux Foundation engineers and provide them with necessary information about ROSA releases.

AppChecker analyzes compatibility of application with particular distribution by comparing a set of shared libraries and binary symbols required by application with sets of libraries and symbols provided by the system. Satisfaction of such requirements is a necessary condition of successful application launching in the operating system — if some library or symbol is absent, then application cannot be launched in the distribution. The list of libraries and binary symbols required for the application is obtained by analyzing application binary executables (in ELF format) and shared libraries. To be sure, only those requirements are taken into account that are not satisfied by libraries of the application itself. AppChecker actually emulates work of the system loader during application launch; if some required libraries or symbols are missing in the system, the application will simply fail to start (or will silently fail during its work, if lazy binding is used).

One should note that AppChecker contains data only about limited set of widespread libraries, not about all those that exist in distribution repositories. More precisely, it is guaranteed that the information is correct for libraries from the 'approved' list (http://linuxbase.org/navigator/browse/rawlib.php?cmd=display-approved) which currently contains almost 1,500 entries, while repositories of most distributions (in partiular, ROSA) contains several thousands of libraries. If application requires library not included in the approved list, AppChecker will honestly report that it can’t say if this library is present in certain distributions or not.

As an example usage, one can see that the Firefox build downloaded from http://mozilla.org (of the version 19.0.2 at the moment of writing this article) cannot be used in old systems such as Fedora 10 or Ubuntu 9.04.


LinuxAppChecker for firefox.png

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