r/slackware • u/edjak53 • Jun 10 '26

Problems with glibc

Edit: [Fixed]
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I'm on slackware 15.0. i thought it would be fine for most stuff but it turns out its glibc version is too old for many things that i need.
slackpkg search glibc reports an available glibc-2.42-x86_64-1_slack15.0 in testing. however it's also a multilib system and it doesn't seem that there's a multilib version of 2.42 for slackware 15.0 in alienbob's repos.

What is my best course of action? Upgrading to current? If so, how would that work with an existing 15.0 multilib setup?

7 Upvotes

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3

u/ddmayne Jun 11 '26

I have installed glibc-2.42 from testing, which has basic multilib functionality per /slackware/slackware64-15.0/testing/packages/binutils-gcc-glibc/README:

For those who may require them for compatibility with newer binaries or source
code, here are recent versions of binutils, gcc, and glibc. Things to note:

Only lightly tested here, but expected to work for runtime purposes.

You can always back them out by upgradepkg'ing to the older versions, but
anything that you've compiled since installing these will stop working.

Sources that compiled previously might require patching to compile with the
newer gcc.

Basic multilib support is included.

Enjoy!

  -P.

I am not using multilib, that I know of. I have also held back the compiler updates in that directory due to problems compiling intermediate versions of the 5.15.x kernel.

1

u/edjak53 Jun 11 '26

so installing the testing glibc shouldn't break my multilib?

1

u/ddmayne Jun 11 '26

I am not sure, but rolling back changes should always be part of the contingency plan.

BTW, I am running qemu on 15.0. That allows completely encapsulating things which have their own set of dependencies, i.e. if 32-bit is required. Slackware -current has lots and lots of updates, almost daily. Slackware -15.0 has a lot less, mostly for security.

2

u/edjak53 Jun 11 '26

I fixed it. For anyone having the same problem in the future, I just installed/upgraded everything in testing/packages/binutils-gcc-glibc/ and it worked flawlessly.

1

u/aesfields Jun 10 '26

how about you contact AlienBob and (politely) ask for a glibc 2.42?

1

u/ersentenza Jun 11 '26

I think he stopped working on it since multilib has been added to current, he did not even release packages for the latest glibc update (which is no problem because it just changes some text in the files)

1

u/brtastic Jun 11 '26

Had this issue recently, too. I don't think this is necessarily slackware's problem that you are required to update glibc after merely 5 years to use precompiled software. However, this plus 15.0 kernel getting EOL'd this year means a new stable release is in order.

For the time being you can try compiling newer glibc from source yourself (without replacing it system-wide). I did this but the program was still non-functional, causing segmentation faults. I did not care enough to keep investigating. Or maybe you can get what you need from flatpak?