Portability of an executable to another Linux machine

Question

I've installed the program Motion on one Linux machine (M1) and want the same program on another (M2).

There are various builds of this program, and I have forgotten which one I have used, so can I do a straight copy of the user/bin/motion file from M1 and place it in the user/bin/motion of M2?

I know where the configuration file is, so I'll move that across, but I'm not sure on what video drivers the working version of motion uses on M2; is there any way of finding out?

Is there a way that I can find out its dependencies?

Solution

For moving one program to other computer you have to move:

1) Executable file
A simple way to finding commands path is type command.

For example: type cal

cal is /usr/bin/cal

2) Library dependencies
You can find library dependencies with ldd command, But remember if you compiled a program from source the CPU Architecture of both server must be the same.

For example: ldd date

linux-vdso.so.1 => (0x00007fff83dff000)
librt.so.1 => /lib64/librt.so.1 (0x0000003784e00000)
libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x0000003783e00000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib64/libpthread.so.0 (0x0000003784200000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x0000003783a00000)

3) Configuration files
In new server you may need to tell the program to re-create the configuration files because that configuration files belongs to previous server.

4) Checking hardware dependency
For checking this I think you have to check program's website for supporting hardwares or you have to test program in new environment.

Comments

[User]

How do I find where the executable is stored? I think its in user/bin/ called motion. It runs at machine boot, so could this give me any clues as to where the executable is stored?