debian binary compatability...

[Digby Tarvin <digbyt@acm.org>]

Still trying to work out why binary executables which file(1) identifies
as:
   ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV),
   dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped

Which are part of a non-source commercial Linux application dated from
around 1998, and ran fine on my SuSE system, won't execute on a
Debian system, and doesn't even seem to return a sensible error
message:

strace /tmp/setup
strace: exec: No such file or directory
execve("/tmp/setup", ["/tmp/setup"], [/* 17 vars */]) = 0

I get the same result on Debian 2.4 and 2.6 stable kernels.

The old SuSE system was 2.4.10, and I originally thought it might have
been some backward compatability in my old SuSE kernel that has been
deprecated in more recent kernels, but I have just tried it on a 
Gentoo system with kernel 2.6.12, and appart from complaining about a
missing shared library it runs on that as well, so it does appear to
be a Debian issue.

I have checked my kernel config for any likely looking
executable format options, don't see any optional ELF formats.

Just to prove it is not a shell oddity, access permissions or
mistyping a name, here is a trivial test program:

	#include <unistd.h>
	char prog[] = "/tmp/setup";
	main()
	{
	        int     val;
	
	        if(access(prog, X_OK) != 0)
	        {
	                printf("file does not exist\n");
	                exit(1);
	        }
	        val = execl(prog, prog, 0);
	        printf("exec returned %d\n", val);
	        perror(prog);
	}

which produces the following output:

	exec returned -1
	/tmp/setup: No such file or directory

Does anyone have any idea what is going on??

Regards,
DigbyT
-- 
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                          digbyt(at)digbyt.com
http://www.digbyt.com