Re: Going back to 32 bit from 64 bit

["Jerry Feldman-2" <user=4@nabble.blu.org>]

 On Tue, 16 Oct 2007 11:58:57 -0400 
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.