This is a short report of various successful installations of ifeffit (and companion programs athena, artemis etc...) on linux boxes running Mandrake 8.1 8.2 and 9.0. However I would like to report one nagging failure which is summarized in the subject line of the message. On my office DELL under Linux Mandrake 9.0 ifeffit core dump and ldd issues the rather terse error message "unknown exit code (139)". The very same code runs fine and (ldd gives a meaningfull answer!) on other machines running the very same version of linux (including gcc, ld, glib etc...). I checked on google and found other people running into very similar problem (OK on one machine, wrong on the other). I tried to recompile ifeffit.f using --static but I could not get the static version of libX11 so for the time being I gave up. BTW it is not too bad as I can use the software on the same computer booting an older version (mdk 8.1) and at home on a 9.0 ! I hope this information may be useful to someone sometime ? -- J. Roux, CNRS-Institut des Sciences de la Terre 1a rue de la Férollerie, 45071 ORLEANS cedex 2, France