Linux ‘ls’ – what does the * mean

Load average is a gauge of how many processes are on average, concurrently demanding CPU attention.

Generally, if you have one process running at 100%, and it just sits like that for all eternity, you can expect all values to approach '1'.

Generally, this is as efficient computing as you can get, no losses due to context-switches.

However, on modern multitasking OS's, there is more than one thing that needs CPU attention, so under a moderate amount of load from a single process, load average should float between 0.8 and 2.

If you decide to do something insane, like build a kernel with make -j 60, despite only having one logical processor, then load average would rush towards 60, and your computer would be incredibly useless to you (death by context switch).

Also to note, this metric is irrespective of how many cores/CPUs there are. For a two-cored system, running one process that consumes a whole core (leaving the other idle) results in a load average of 1.0. In order to decide how loaded a system is, you'll need to know the number of cores and do the division yourself.

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams has already explained about the *:

It means that the file is executable. A classifier is shown when -F is passed to ls via the command line or otherwise.

As for the executable-looking emulator that you can't actually execute, this can happen when the dynamic loader requested by emulator doesn't exist. You can check what kind of file emulator is with the command file emulator, and check what dynamic loader and libraries it needs with ldd emulator (any line showing “not found” is something you need to install).

Given the name of the directory and the size of the file, emulator is probably a Linux x86 binary. I suspect you have an amd64 system. If so, you need to install a runtime environment for 32-bit applications; on Ubuntu, you need the ia32-libs package (and perhaps also ia32-libs-gtk).

You could also get this error message for a script whose interpreter as indicated in the #! line doesn't exist.