Well, I am doing this in part for the learning experience, so I'll do some checking. As far, I only have the basic system [A, D, and part of the X packagegroups] installed, so there's not a whole bunch there to upgrade.
Honestly, it'd prolly be harder to install a newer system version than it would be to work with the one I have... Anything above the 2.2 kernel family doesn't seem to like the hardware in that laptop, and it'd require an unbelievable amount of tweaking to get even the basics working. I mean, that computer doesn't even have PCI... I think it's working off EISA. I even have about 2 dozen PC-card NICs around, but none of them will work since they're all 32-bit cardbus and the laptop only has 16-bit PCMCIA support. You getting an idea what I'm dealing with here?
Now, I do suppose I could split the difference, upgrade the libs and gcc and such to a newer version, but not the most recent, and then go for a slightly older version of Blackbox, like maybe .65 or something. The idea being that, while it might have problems with the newest stuff, I'd only have to hunt down, say, 3 year old versions of software, rather than 7 year old versions. Does that make sense? Would that be reasonable to do?
Also, is there a good simplified tutorial on the basics of this kinda thing? I still don't even know really what a C library does, and why different library and compiler versions have compatibility problems... Maybe if I can get a basic understanding of the concepts involved, I'd have an easier time solving these sorts of problems...
Edit: OK, I ran that command, long list of stuff that says "is not a.out or ELF" with some "exited with signal 11" and some couldn't read headers. I gather that I was only looking for files that *were* a.out tor ELF format, so all those are ok.
mkdosfs and dosfsck showed libstdc++.so.6 not found, but it scrolled too fast for me to read exactly what it said... (the |more switch didn't work, is there any way to make that output scrollable or send it to a file so I can see exactly what it said?) Those were the only two that showed such a message.