Actually, until just two months ago, I was using an ancient (Slackware
3) installation to do lots of AbiWord development work. As long as
I built without the static binary (which is only very rarely needed),
everything worked fine except for libpng. For some reason, opening
AbiWord would fail when the splashscreen (which uses libpng) would
come up. "abiword -nosplash" would fix that.
-- Shaw Terwilliger