A final report on the issue of FFI on Linux:

A while back (Oct 6, 2000 ), Bert Freudenberg posted a message stating:

 "I just tried the Squeak-2.8pre3-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz from UIUC -- you're right! It's broken. The SqueakFFIPrims.so there is linked dynamically 
against libffi.so, which does not work if you don't have it installed. You can get a statically linked version from http://wwwisg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/
~raab/squeak/FFI/Unix/i686-pc-linux-gnu/".

I just downloaded SqueakFFIPrims.so from the afore mentioned web site and replace the exiting SqueakFFIPrims.so. And EUREKA! It works!

No need to download libffi.so since its statically linked into SqueakFFIPrims.so.

Much thanks to Bert Freudenberg and Kevin Fisher and Bob Arning.

John