Can I install a package for x86 in amd64?
 

Hi there.

I am currently running debian lenny amd64 on my desktop, and I found a nice image manager I would like to try, but they only have it for x86 architecture, so my question is if I can install this x86 version in my amd64 architecture without problems or without generating conflicts.

Thanks in advance.

Hi, sure you can install it, but you will have to install all libraries it depends on, also in 32bits. No conflicts should come from this.

Maybe serafean understands something I don't. But my experience is that it is not as simple as the above post makes it sound. It isn't terribly hard, but it is a bit tricky and may involve some tedious details.

See my recent post at
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...17#post3376217

So far as I understand, in Debian you can't use the ordinary process for installing packages either for the 32bit package you want or for its 32bit dependencies.

Some of the 32bit dependencies will be covered by packages specific to providing 32 bit support in a 64bit system. But it may not be obvious which dependencies are covered that way or by which packages.

When installing the package you want or any dependencies that you need from 32 bit packages, the only working method I've found is to open the .deb file as an archive and pull out files, manually substituting directory names (mainly changing /lib/ names to /lib32/).

Alright, so it is not as easy as I thought. I will give it a try though =).

Sorry if I mislead you, but under Gentoo portage handles all of this very well, and to compile an application in 32 bits, I just run "linux32 make" and point it to the location of 32bit libraries (done it once, maybe I just got lucky). Also, if I enable the "multilib" USE flag, I have both 64 and 32 bit libraries installed (of the packages supporting that flag).

Very useful to know it. +1 to gentoo linux then :P I will have to find how to do it here in debian xD. I was searching within the directories and I found 3! lib directories.

/usr/share/lib
/usr/share/lib32
/usr/share/lib64

My confusion started when I found that lib and lib32, I understood that lib and lib32 here in my machine must to be only one lib corresponding to 32 bit apps, but it seems that I am mistaken.

There shouldn't be any reason why this "is not as simple as it seems" to achieve.

From my experience, just putting the libs for the correct bitness on the correct place will make it work. That's basically what Gentoo does. However, to be able to compile 32 bits stuff on x86_64 is another story. Gentoo is good at this as someone else pointed out. The default profile includes multilib, this allows us to compile and run grub, wine and many other in x86_64 without any extra work.

The required 32 bits libraries are pushed into the system as dependencies if you try to emerge an x86-only package in x86_64. It's completely transparent to the user.

lib and lib64 should be the same directory in Debian (one or both is a symbolic link).

lib32 is where all the 32 bit .so files go.