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What do you guys do when you want to run unmaintained programs? (lemmy.world)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I recently wanted to run tegaki, and my experience is pretty much summed up by the meme. I consider myself fairly tech-savvy, but I just couldn't figure out how to compile it. So I just gave up, downloaded the .exe and put it into a fresh wine prefix. After installing CJK fonts, everything ran fine. Now I'm trying to get gpaint to work. ~~My distro recently dropped support for gtk+2 (which I am fairly pissed about, since it's the last good version of GTK+), so I have to set that up manually as well.~~ [[[ EDIT: gtk2 is alive and well. I was just being and idiot and searching for gtk2, when the package is actually called gtk+2. ]]] I installed all of the dependencies that ./configure told me to, but I still kept getting obscure errors when running make.

So, here's my question: what tools make the process of running abandonware easier? Docker containers? Also, what can I use to package abandonware in order to make it easy for other people to run? Flatpak? Appimages? Any advice is appreciated!

Also, inb4 "just find a modern alternative". That would be a reasonable solution. I don't want reasonable solutions!

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

A method I have not seen mentioned yet (for when you have an old precompiled version of an app):

Identify the missing libs. You can run the program, but sometimes it's easier to use ldd
Use your web browser to download the missing libs from Debian's repos (stable or older if need be). Unfortunately you often also have to grab their deps too.
Extract the .debs
Move all of the .so files into the same folder as the old program you are trying to run
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$(pwd)"
Now try running the app

It often takes a bit of fiddling, but it's worked for me a few times and you only need to fetch the few libraries you are missing. For bigger things however it can be a dependency hell, you might as well use the distro's actual package manager inside a chroot.

Note: You don't need to be using Debian as your host distro, I don't. As long as it's a glibc based distro you should be mostly fine (glibc is mostly backwards compatible)