I just tried to install Slickedit 2007, my programmer’s editor of choice, on my 64-bit install of Ubuntu 7.10. When I ran the vsinst executable from the CD, I got:
sudo: unable to execute ./vsinst: No such file or directory
This even though vsinst most definitely existed. The problem? Well, I quickly reasoned that I was trying to install a 32-bit version of SlickEdit (Note to SlickEdit: produce a 64-bit Linux binary already!) on a 64-bit Ubuntu install. Unlike 64-bit Windows, which automatically ships with 32-bit versions of all the system libraries for backward-compatibility with 32-bit apps, Ubuntu apparently leaves that as an exercise to the user. Thank God for this post, which taught me to install the ia32-lib and lsb-core packages via apt-get; once that was done the install went w/o a hitch.
That’s two icky Ubuntu gotchas in as many days. I’m afraid you Linux fanboys have a way to go before you conquer the desktop…