Hi all,

i386 support seems to work OK. aptitude hasn't been fixed to work correctly yet or something -- always has curious issues with the :i386, but apt-get seems to do it's job okay.

Today, as an experiment, I tried adding the armel architecture lines to /etc/apt/sources.list, for ports.ubuntu.com. clean, update, upgrade. Package manager in good state.

Now, when I try to install packages for :armel with apt-get, it's "not working." It's dependency hell.

Has anyone tried this for armel, armhf, etc.? Is it supposed to work at this point? Or are we waiting for armel to get merged to the main repos, say maybe with 12.04?

Q: 64-bit ARM CPU's aren't even available yet, are they?

My understanding was that prototypes wouldn't be available until as late as 2014?

Anyway, the kernel itself should support ARM-64:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qe.../msg03773.html

http://learninglinuxkernel.com/Introduction_05.html
<= look under arch/arm/arm64 directory in the kernel source

I *VERY* seriously doubt anything is ready for public consumption in the Debian/Ubuntu sources yet. There's certainly nothing about arm64 mentioned on the Debian Wiki, for example.

Hi Paul,

That's not really what I mean. I'm talking about installing 32-bit ARM packages on an x86_64 host, for the purpose of cross-compiling, using those foreign packages.

You need to install those arm packages in a separate root -either a mounted partition or in a subdir somewhere. Installing such packages normally will overwrite your working programs and leave with a non-working installation.

@gnashley: your suggestion is already part of the multi-arch spec. Currently libs in ubuntu and debian are being moved to /usr/lib/target-triplet, e.g. /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/.

But yes, trying to install armel is currently trying to replace core system packages, not adding the arch specific versions.