My point was not really specific to the difference between versions 1.6.2 and 1.6.5, since I have used gretl on Windows for some time and can continue to do so. Further, I don't doubt that it is possible to rely upon some versions of Linux which are directly compatible with the versions relied upon by gretl's developers or packagers. But, Linux is a broad church with an increasing of users who look for a standard desktop distribution - most of which are conservative in updating core libraries. However, I have found that trying to update various libraries to resolve gretl dependencies has caused me serious problems in several versions of Linux including Debian, Suse & RH derivatives. What I have learned is that you go beyond the versions that are provided by the relevant repositories at your peril and in many cases distributions rely upon releases of key libraries that are several generations out of date. Secondly, there can be important but unexpected problems even when the dependencies appear to have been resolved. For example, I have just discovered that I can't run version 1.6.2 properly because my installed version of LAPACK has unresolved symbols to the GNU Fortran library. This is irritating but not disastrous for me because I used to design and write econometric software many years ago, so that I can track down the missing libraries though I would prefer not to have to spend the time on it. Also I have a Windows virtual machine on my Linux system on which I can easily run gretl, though that rather defeats the point of the exercise. The key issue is that this kind of difficulty is likely to put off 95% of potential or actual users of gretl on Linux. Administrators of centrally managed computing facilities hate to deal with such matters. That is the reason for considering a statically linked version for Linux - to widen the potential group of users beyond the relatively small group of highly motivated cognoscenti. Gordon Hughes