Wxwidgets issue running binary on another computer

Question

Hello when I build my wxWidgets GUI application on Linux the build goes fine. I can even run it and it works as expected. When I copy the binary to another Ubuntu computer and try to run it I get this error:

./app2: error while loading shared libraries: libwx_baseu_unofficial-3.1.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Even when copying the lib across I still get an issue. Why is it dependent on external libraries and how can I solve this problem as I don't want other computers to require this library to be installed? I suppose I could try to statically link it but others recommend you do not do this.

Answer 1

You need to install the entire wxWidgets runtime/shared library on any machine you copy your binary onto. This is the whole point of using aptitude -- each binary package has a list of dependencies that get installed along with it.

To overcome this you need to statically link your binary. You are currently using shared linking, which relies on, as you note, external libraries. ".so" means Shared Object. You'll have to link against static archive libraries, often ending in ".a". Typically development packages provided by aptitude do not provide these, so you will probably have to compile wxWidgets yourself to provide these. Just make sure to also statically link and compile all of wxWidgets downstream dependencies as well. This is the major downside of static linking.

You can also look into something like Holy Build Box.