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Re: Going back to 32 bit from 64 bit



 On Tuesday 16 October 2007 02:56:31 pm Kristian Erik Hermansen wrote: 
> Well Jon Hermansen, my brother (who is a fedora user), told me that 
> 64-bit builds of fedora have a fully installable 32-bit firefox 
> package alongside 64-bit firefoxm. True?  What I meant was that on 
> ubuntu you had to separately go out and pull down the official binary, 
> which will not receive important security fixes as I presume you would 
> with firefox32 on fedora64... 

Yes, all the 32-bit Fedora stuff is actually in the x86_64 repositories, and 
properly updated along with everything else when needed. So is it simply a 
matter of the Ubuntu 64-bit repos not actually having the 32-bit stuff 
in 'em? 



> On 10/16/07, Jarod Wilson <[hidden email]> wrote: 
> > On Tuesday 16 October 2007 02:25:59 pm Kristian Erik Hermansen wrote: 
> > > I think you are mistaken.  I have built plenty of both 32-bit and 
> > > 64-bit binaries on Ubuntu.  They offer both lib32 and lib64 
> > > directories.  Again, there is no need for a chroot... 
> > 
> > Huh. Perhaps I'm getting confused with the early days of 64-bit Debian. 
> > Honestly, I haven't followed any distributions outside of those built 
> > inside our own walls in the last year or so... If what you say is true 
> > (and I assume 
> > it is), then what exactly are the remaining problems with multi-arch 
> > support on Ubuntu? 
> > 
> > > On 10/16/07, Jarod Wilson <[hidden email]> wrote: 
> > > > On Oct 16, 2007, at 11:38, Jerry Feldman wrote: 
> > > > > On Tue, 16 Oct 2007 09:52:56 -0400 
> > > > > 
> > > > > Jarod Wilson <[hidden email]> wrote: 
> > > > >> A very important distinction to make here: some distributions 
> > > > >> (including Fedora) have gone to great lengths to try to sanely 
> > > > >> support multi-arch (mixing of 64-bit and 32-bit applications/ 
> > > > >> libraries/etc), while others (including Ubuntu) simply punted and 
> > > > >> require you to set up a chroot to run anything 32-bit on top of a 
> > > > >> 64- bit environment. Thus its possible to run pretty much any 
> > > > >> 32-bit userspace application on a 64-bit Fedora install with 
> > > > >> minimal effort. 
> > > > > 
> > > > > Hi Jarod, 
> > > > > I was wondering if you could elaborate a bit more on this. As I 
> > > > > have a few 32-bit things running on Ubuntu 64. Certainly one of the 
> > > > > things you 
> > > > > need is to have both the 32-bit as well as 64-bit libraries. As I 
> > > > > documented, this morning I installed wine, which is a 32-bit 
> > > > > executable. 
> > > > 
> > > > As I now understand it, there's actually a ia32-libs package or some 
> > > > such thing that provides a few essential 32-bit libs for 64-bit 
> > > > Ubuntu systems, so my blanket statement about requiring a chroot for 
> > > > anything 32-bit wasn't quite right. However, outside of the scope of 
> > > > binaries that are built to use those compat libs, 32-bit apps on a 
> > > > 64- bit Ubuntu system require a 32-bit chroot, as the bulk of 32-bit 
> > > > and 64-bit libraries are identically named and placed in identical 
> > > > paths on the file system (typically, /usr/lib/libfoo.so.1). What 
> > > > Fedora opted to do was put all 64-bit libraries in a different path 
> > > > (/usr/ lib64/libfoo.so.1), which allows concurrent installation of 
> > > > both the 32-bit and 64-bit varieties of the very same libraries, and 
> > > > the 32- bit libraries you install are laid down by the exact same 
> > > > packages you'd install on a pure 32-bit system. 


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