Comment 4 for bug 966472

> is this still an issue?

Yes.

> latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO images are available

Downloaded the 386 one. It is too big to burn on a CD, 963641344 bytes.

# mount -o loop trusty-desktop-i386.iso /a
# cd /a/caspar
# mount -o loop filesystem.squashfs /b
# cd /b/boot
# grep AOUT conf*
CONFIG_HAVE_AOUT=y
CONFIG_BINFMT_AOUT=m

Looks good. Now find a way to actually test this. Preferably without rebooting.
Some virtual machine? Installed VMware Player, booted this image, and
# ./program
-bash: ./program: cannot execute binary file
# file program
program: Linux/i386 demand-paged executable (ZMAGIC)
# ldd program
        not a dynamic executable
Probably it also requires some libraries, like libc.so.4 and libm.so.4.
And possibly /lib/ld.so.

I recall that there used to be packages like libc4 and maybe aout-binutils
but I cannot find any such thing right now.