At my company we have the sandbox. This uses different free libraries that we compile within a specific directory (to not have problems with the system installation of a customer.) This means you need to include an RPATH in the binary (.ELF) files.
Most of the libraries that we use have a modern configure script that uses libtool. libtool knows how to automatically add the RPATH information to the libraries and binaries generated in a project.
Today I had a problem with one of our computers. It did not want to boot. The boot loader is called GRUB. Most Linux distributions now use GRUB which is much more advanced than LILO and some other boot loaders.
GRUB is great for several reasons: