Libc and other libraries
 

Hi all;

Just a few short and quick questions (and easy for you linux guru's out there :) ).

Im studying shared libraries in linux and how they are linked at linking time during the compilation process. I travered to the /lib directory and looked at my libc library. As my book said there was a link between the libc.so.6 to the more specifiec release of the library. What confused me was that lib.so.6 was linked to libc-2.2.93.so

My book said that the library name is most usually in the form libc.so.major_number.minor_number. Also why is the '6 version' of libc linked to 2.2.93, which i am assuming is the 2nd version? I could be (and probably am) wrong in my analysis.

My 2nd question is where to download the latest versions of libraries, more specifically libc. I tried the link my book gave me: ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org but I could not find any of the libraries. Also i tried a google/linux but the result was a bunch of giberish.

Anyways, all help is appreciated, and thanks in advance;
Movitto

gnu libc
that lib you have there is glibc6-2.2.93
as opposed to the old glibc5 series

be carefull upgrading glibc from source -- outside of your package manager
glibc is the core of the system and requires a little knowhow to compile.
So if you install it from source be aware you are putting your system at risk.
also installing glibc (a rather large pile of libs and utilities) from source will put your package manager out of synk with your system sending you off in a new self compiled direction never to return.

at the very least remember to unpack the
Glibc-linuxthreads inside the glibc directory
and use the configure flag
--enable-add-ons
or your system won't work

also there are many subtle problems between versions of glibc and versions of gcc
that can require patches before it will compile

Thank you very much foo_bar_foo your response was very informative and the link you gave was great. Once again thanks for all your help