When building shared objects for plugin usage, like the case for NSS I noted, PAM plugins or extensions for languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, Java… you don’t need static libraries at all, so a shared object is enough!

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.

Package installation for Linux distributions has traditionally separated libraries and application binaries into different packages, so that only one version of a library would be installed and it would be shared by applications that use it.

ABI-compliance-checker is a lightweight tool for checking backward binary compatibility of shared C/C++ libraries in OS Linux. It checks interface signatures and data type definitions in two library versions (it checks header files along with shared objects) and searches ABI changes that may lead to incompatibility.

A few months ago we had a blog entry about shared and personal laptops in schools. The goal of shared laptops is basically that they should behave mostly like shared thin clients: it should not matter which a computer any user chooses to work with.

Dynamically linked shared libraries are an important aspect of GNU/Linux®. They allow executables to dynamically access external functionality at run time and thereby reduce their overall memory footprint (by bringing functionality in when it's needed).

I ran the command google-chrome in Konsole and then received the infamous error while loading shared libraries: libbz2.so.1.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory message. This problem has been coming up a lot in Mandriva. And I had to do a lot of digging to get a work around for this.

From my perspective, offline installation is the weakest spot in the Linux superstructure. I understand the shared libraries concept, and I think it’s a marvelous thing, but it doesn’t erase the fact that if you’re not in a position for at least intermittent Internet access, it’s a dealbreaker.

A new advocacy group, the Public Software Foundation (PSF), is working to make free and open source software available to local libraries so it can be checked out and used just like a book or video. The premise is simple: hand out one CD and maybe you've taught one person; make it available in a library and perhaps you'll reach hundreds or thousands.