http://beginlinux.com/blog/2009/09/installing-32-bit-support-into-64-bit-fedora-11/Installing 32-bit Support into 64-bit Fedora 11Posted on September 04th, 2009 in Uncategorized
If you’re running newer hardware, there are some definite advantages to installing a 64-bit operating system. But, if you still need to run any 32-bit applications, you’ll need to have the 32-bit support libraries installed. Different Linux distros handle this in different ways. Just for clarity, Fedora runs 32-bit applications fine. If you install the 32-bit version you will have access to all of the apps you want. This article is simply to show one way of adding the possibility of 32-bit apps on a 64-bit system. For 64-bit Ubuntu, finding the proper 32-bit support packages is a simple matter of opening up the Synaptic Package Manager, and searching for the string “ia32”. With 64-bit openSuSE, 32-bit support is already built-in, so you don’t have to do anything. With Fedora, though, it’s a whole different story. Not only are the 32-bit packages not already installed, the Fedora folk don’t provide any documentation on how to install them. The directions I found via Google were outdated, and wouldn’t work. I finally resolved the problem by asking a Red Hat employee in my local Linux Users Group. Add an “rpm” Macro This isn’t an absolute necessity, but it’s handy. Add the following line to the “/etc/rpm/macros” file: %_query_all_fmt %%{name}-%%{version}-%%{release}.%%{arch} Now, when you query for information about rpm packages, you’ll be able to see whether they’re 32-bit or 64-bit packages. sudo rpm -q SDL Add the Libraries Next, add the 32-bit libraries by copying the following list, and pasting it into a text file. Save it as “Fedora-ia32.txt”. arts.i586 Finally, “su” to a root shell, and run the following command: # for i in $(< Fedora-ia32.txt ); do yum -y install $i; done When the process completes, you can verify that you have both 32-bit and 64-bit packages installed. sudo rpm -q SDL A Caveat By having to use the entire package name, all the way up through the arch designation, we open ourselves up to a slight problem. That is, package version numbers are also part of the package names. So, by the time you read this, the script may have been partially broken due to Fedora packages having been updated to newer versions. Here’s the way around that. Go ahead and do the procedure as written. Then, as root, run the following command: for i in $(< Fedora-ia32.txt ); do rpm -q >> rpm_results.txt $i; done If package versions have changed, you’ll see a “not installed” error
message for it in the output file. Then, you can open Yum Extender,
and search for the update version to install. The reason that the directions that I found via Google didn’t work, is that the package list referenced the “i386” packages that were part of Fedora 10. With Fedora 11, the “i386” packages have been replaced by “i586” packages Article Submitted by Donnie Tevault  |
