10-23-2008 01:00 AM
Shared libraries that are dynamically linked make more efficient use of disk space than those that are statically linked, and more importantly allow you to perform security updates in a more efficient manner, but executables compiled against a particular version of a dynamic library expect that version of the shared library to be available on the machine they run on. If you are running machines with both Fedora 9 and openSUSE 11, the versions of some shared libraries are likely to be slightly different, and if you copy an executable between the machines, the file might fail to execute because of these version differences. With ELF Statifier you can create a statically linked version of an executable, so the executable includes the shared libraries instead of seeking them at run time. A staticly linked executable is much more likely to run on a different Linux distribution or a different version of the same distribution.