A modern Linux distribution represents a powerful development platform, capable of compiling and executing a sophisticated scientific application developed using a modern software language. Minimal changes were required to compile Chimera, allowing the Chimera developers to focus their efforts on producing their software, rather than debugging their build environment. We especially appreciated that g++ and STLport helped us find programming errors which were not flagged by other C++ compilers. When developing sophisticated C++ applications that make use of dynamic linking, it is important to understand the behavior of the runtime linker, especially with respect to static constructors.