354409 - firefox 2 rc1 will not start due to libstdc++.so.5 dependency

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 259888

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[Michael Gilbert]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060830 Firefox/1.5.0.7 (Debian-1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.7-1)
Build Identifier: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/2.0rc1-candidates/rc1/firefox-2.0.en-GB.linux-i686.tar.gz

just downloaded the firefox 2 rc1 release, which fails because my system has the binary-incompatible libstdc++.so.6 library:

$ ./firefox
./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

$ ls /usr/lib/libstdc*
/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6  /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6.0.8

i am using debian etch (testing), but you will be able to see this as well if you install debian sid (unstable), and probably ubuntu edgy, and maybe fedora 6.

the solution is to statically link libstdc++.a into the firefox executable.  this ensures that your software still works if users have different versions of libraries.  i am ignorant about your build set up, but suppose the main firefox code is in firefox-main.c, then this is how you should link (assuming you're using a debian release and you have the libstdc++6-4.1-dev package installed):

$ gcc firefox-main.c /usr/lib/gcc/i486-linux-gnu/4.1.2/libstdc++.a

thanks.

mike

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Felix Miata]

libstdc++.so.6 and libstdc++.so.5 can co-exist. Some distros automatically provide the compat lib in addition to the current one.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 259888 ***