You can verify that dietlibc was successfully installed on your system by entering the following on a bash prompt (as non-root user), e.g.: printf '#include <unistd.h>\nint main(){write(1,"hello\\n",6);}\n' >_tmp.c diet gcc -O2 -s _tmp.c ./a.out you should see "hello" printed on screen "size a.out" entered on prompt should print something like like this: text data bss dec hex filename 1292 12 72 1376 560 a.out Please note: You may get strange results on Slackware multilib systems, (like $ARCH being ignored by dietlibc's make itself). Therefore it is recommended to build only on clean (64/32bit) installs.