Hi guys been using sid for about 3 months now love it. have had zero problems on my desktop with steam and nvidia graphics, however on my laptop with intel video I cannot get steam installed without messing up my system. So is sid multiarch capable and can two packages i.e. xorg and xorg:i386 coexist on a sid system or did i set it up wrong. I did an expert install, this is a fresh box. It says I need the mesa dri and mesa glx i386 packages. But they cannot be installed without changing everything over to i386 so what am I doing wrong?

Debian IS multiarch, so all you have to do is add a i386 repo and install the missing libs.

https://wiki.debian.org/Steam

Sorry the problem was the fact that apparently you can not have different versions of multiarch packages installed. In other words xorg 1.0 amd64 and xorg .99 i386 won't coexist. So i dunno kind of sucks to have had gone through all that but at least now Debian is starting to feel like linux again! :P

I guess I just won't install steam anytime soon ........... a little upset, thought debian was the end of my linux struggles

EDIT:
I'm hoping that in the next few days the 32 bit packages will catch up in their versions.

I'm back! :/ ... I came back to tell others about my experience and final solution. I learned quite a bit more about apt and debian from the whole sid experience, and Debian with Apt has continued to impress me more and more.

Without going into too much detail I was a repo hater of sorts and thought there was no good package repo system out there in the quest for the most stable and "perfect" linux customized workstation.

I was at the linux world expo in nyc in the summer of 2001 and my first distro was Redhat 95, even remember Caldera linux before IBM bought them. Then I stopped using linux for years because of a lack of a good package management system. When the ubuntu buzz started around 2004-2005 I was once again intrigued and by 2006 I was back into linux without really knowing that ubuntu was based on debian. I began to use it and liked it, however after version 10 I became less interested feeling as though the os wasn't right for me.

I switched to slackware around 2009 in an attempt to learn Linux again from the ground up with a unix-like philosophy and never went back to Windows, and yeah I mean never! So last year I got frustrated while compiling something or sound broke in an update in slackware. I decided I had relearned enough to pick a distro that was more mainstream and better supported. After flirting with (or should I say breaking) fedora and arch finding them unsuitable for my perfect setup I chose debian.

I was loving the debian world, so effortless, fast, stable, and mature, like a pure breed race horse. I was able to break those older versions of ubuntu with apt, however after downgrading using apt pinning from sid to testing last night, and resolving my multiarch problems with steam and other 32 bit applications (not to mention the last year of home and remote server and desktop setups), I am convinced that apt is the best software management platform ever created.

Just wanted to say thank you to the Debian support community here, and to all the devs for there hard work and dedication, for making this wonderful distro, and for making my life so much easier! Debian is truly a world class linux distro and imo, leagues ahead of the proprietary operating systems that dominate the market share.

I say let them have their closed source software, it suits their closed mindedness and lack of imagination. I feel like I have rediscovered posix through slackware and debian and I look forward to many, many more good years moving into the cloudy and exciting future of FOSS!

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