Another delight discovered (Ubuntu)

[ssurgul]

So, I posted previously about my frustration with having a lot of code not compatible with the AMD64 architecture, and thus not being able to easily move to a 64-bit platform in Linux/BSD lands. I was trolling around for a completely 'other' reason on some of the Ubuntu install boards, and found this happy little switch:

--force-architecture

Seems that little add-on to either apt-get or dpkg disables the architecture check, and will happily install a 32-bit program set into a 64-bit architecture. No need to build a virtual machine solely to run some of the programs any longer. Seems that Ubuntu, like Vista and XP, manages 32-bit code right alongside the 64-bit internally, and sets up separate install bases for them. Handy, but frustrating that it's only now that I found it.

Comments

Gentoo is similair.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

It just installs pre-packaged '32-bit emulation' libraries as you need them, or you can go the whole-hog seperated method if you choose and set up a full 32-bit chroot for stuff to run inside of akin to the WoW64 stuff under Windows 64-bit platforms. The 'merged universe' stuff with the emulation libraries usually works perfectly well, though some people prefer to fully segregate their 32-bit-only code just so they know what's left that isn't native 64-bit if nothing else.

Re: Gentoo is similair.

[ssurgul.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm not to that point yet in my developing Linux skills. I just noticed a pair of library directories and ... some other pairing of directories that I'm not remembering right now courtesy of sleep-dep. Just frustrated me to find that solution after I'd formatted the partition and started over twice now, eventually ending up with the 64bit stuff again. Would have saved me some frustrations is all.

I've been toying with the Gentoo stuff, as well, but for now I think I'll be better easing into the recompile and better understanding of the kernel from within a functional environment so I can see the end result of the efforts, and then compare the results of my efforts against it. I might set up a partition on another box, though, and play around with Gentoo installs from the ground up. We'll see what my 3 weeks without classes leads me to do from boredom. :)

Re: Gentoo is similair.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

For just raw usability by the layman, Ubuntu is far superior to Gentoo. Gentoo is a very common thing for folks to get into once they start running into the limitations of Ubuntu's package manager, or any distro's for that matter. I've just been reformatting my entire laptop, nuked the last of the Windows off of it, to a naked and clean Gentoo 64-bit install.

I'm actually finishing that install as I type this, it gets a bare-bones system up and running pretty quickly, and lets you use that while it hammers away at building the rest of the world for you to use. If you stick to purely the 'stable' stuff, they're very careful not to let stuff break, though I'm a touch more bleeding-edge and having to correct a few things. Worst I've had to deal with so far is recompiling everything with the newest GCC 4.3.x compiler since that has MASSIVE speedups for x86-64 compared to the 3.x series. Painless, just takes an hour or three on a fresh install.

But yeah, lib32/lib64 is the main library seperation, sorry I'd missed your note before about this issue or I'd have tried to save you some grief back then. :-)

Re: Gentoo is similair.

[ssurgul.livejournal.com]

MMMmmm, naked Gentoo. HAWT! ;)

As to the missed note, meh, not a big deal. Computers are a never-ending learning process, and I"m happy to keep learning them up. I 'might' use my Vista64 partition I was saving to use for that purpose and tri-boot over to a Gentoo install/build, just to try and maximize the system, not to mention actually get my stupid Creative Labs X-Fi HD Audio card built into the motherboard to work properly under OSS rather than ALSA.

And now that I know there ARE ways to get 32-bit code to run (maybe not natively but still) on a 64-bit Linux-type OS I'm seeing zero reason to not move forward away from 32-bits since this batch of P4's I have are probably the last ones I'll own that won't support AMD64.