@amadio This post is more than 5 years old but the problem is “known” for more than 10 years (when Ubuntu 10.04 LTS started to provide its own ROOT version):
Actually, with ROOT 6 the “problem” became more serious. Because ROOT 6 versions with “cxx11”, “cxx14” and especially “cxx17” are incompatible with one another (and some features will be incompatible with additional, experiment / analysis specific, software), one needs 3 sets of binaries for each ROOT 6 version so, something like 9 = 3 x 3 binary ROOT 6 distributions installed simultaneously.
Well, hopefully, with the newest ROOT 6 version supporting two python versions simultaneously, one will not need to multiply this number by 2 in order to get both, python2 and python3, features working.
Of course, a casual user, who just wants to play with it, just for fun from time to time, will be fine with a single one.
@Axel There is a long-standing problem with the “.tar.gz” binary distributions provided by the ROOT Team. Each of them relies on some set of system packages (compilers and libraries). Unfortunately, there is no place where these dependencies are explicitly listed. So, could you, please, add some “manifest” file to each of your binary distributions with a detailed list of operating system specific packages which are / can be referenced / needed by these particular binaries. Actually, this file should contain two lists of packages, one “mandatory”, for the bare ROOT functionality to work, and another one “optional”, for any available built-in ROOT functionality to work.
This should not be that difficult to achieve (you do it anyhow for the “.deb” and “.rpm” packages).
It would spare us from extremely many questions here, why some binary does not work on my system. When answering such questions, for me the problem is that I do not have access to your “build system” so I cannot “guess” the names of system packages for that particular operating system. An explicit list of them inside of the “.tar.gz” file would be extremely helpful (plus a small line with an exact command line showing how to install them, as different flavors / versions of operating systems use different package managers).