Can anyone give me a decent guide for installing a 32bit i386 program on my amd64 machine? I'm trying to install zsnes (who doesn't love SuperNintendo?) It's only available in the i386 repos, so obviously I can't get to it through apt-get.

I've tried dpkg -i --force-architecture but using that it installs with the 64 bit files. This isn't a problem for zsnes, since the 32bit is the only one installed. But some of the libraries zsnes uses (libao2 in particular) are already installed as 64bit libraries but not as the 32bit version. Using dpkg to install these just overwrites the 64bit with the 32bit. The program runs, but now one of my libraries is the wrong architecture. How do i get the debs to install into the 32bit directories where they are supposed to be?


Thanks.

I don't think you can cross archs. once the os is installed. Of course you can setup an emulator to emulate x86, and x86 oses can be installed on 64 bit. But probably not crossing each other.

I know you can, A. I had it working, it just overwrote a 64bit library with the 32bit version and it sounded like something that was probably used fairly commonly. Also, if you ever use wine or the flash plugin on amd64 you are running 32bit apps under the amd64 architecture.