I installed Mathematica 9 on an old Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4 system. After the installation, I tried to start Mathematica, but following message came out:
/home/wcbao/M/Wolfram/Mathematica/9.0/SystemFiles/FrontEnd/Binaries/Linux-x86-64/Mathematica: /lib64/tls/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.4' not found (required by /home/wcbao/M/Wolfram/Mathematica/9.0/SystemFiles/Libraries/Linux-x86-64/libML64i3.so)
/home/wcbao/M/Wolfram/Mathematica/9.0/SystemFiles/FrontEnd/Binaries/Linux-x86-64/Mathematica: /lib64/tls/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.4' not found (required by /home/wcbao/M/Wolfram/Mathematica/9.0/SystemFiles/Libraries/Linux-x86-64/libQtCore.so.4)
I don't want to update the system glibc, because it's risky and the administrator don't allow me to do that.
Someone suggested that it is possible to just install new version of glibc somewhere else, and run the program as
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/lib/new your_application
and this will not affect the system.
So I am asking here if this method really works. And if it works, I want to know how to do it step by step (I lack experience in Linux right now, and want to use Mathematica on Linux as soon as possible).
