Starting with version 1.1, this directory will be used to contain versions of Macaulay 2 that we have compiled for GNU/Linux to depend on as few dynamic libraries as possible. We do that to make it as likely as possible that you can run it on your machine.
There are some dynamic libraries that we must link with, such as libc and libncurses. If you have versions of these on your machine are sufficiently different from the versions on ours, the program will not work. See the corresponding *.README files for information about the libraries M2 is linked against.
Please let us know if your (modern) GNU/Linux system is incompatible with this distribution of Macaulay 2.