I just recently got a new computer and installed Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10) on
it. Since the processor is an Athlon 64 X2, I installed the amd64 (or
x86_64, if you prefer) version of Ubuntu. Having gotten the basic system
up, I wanted to get some 3rd party commercial programs (Skype, flash,
etc.) and some media codec, but I'm having some problems. It looks like
many of these packages only exist as 32-bit binaries (usually i386) and I
gather that it isn't trivial to use these in Ubuntu. It never occured to
me that there would be a problem with using i386 packages on an amd64
system, since the processor is still using x86 instructions.
The way I understand it, you have to manually figure out what 32-bit
libraries are required by each package, download them, install them in an
alternate location (so they don't overwrite the 64-bit libraries in /lib),
and maybe do some nonesense with chroot (which I'm not familiar with). I
gather that it's this way with any debian distro. This all sounds like a
whole lot of hassle that I don't need.
So, I have a number of questions:
1) Does anyone know if there is an easier way to deal with using i386
binaries on an amd64 system in Ubuntu or other debian based distros?
2) Are there other (non-Debian-based) distros that make it easy to use
i386 packages with an amd64 system? I'm looking for distros with
trivially easy package management (like apt usually is), i.e. probably not
Gentoo or Slackware.
3) Does it not matter so much whether I use an i386 install or an amd64
one and I should just re-install the system using the i386 install disk
because it'll be the easiest way to deal with the problem?
Your advice is appreciated,
Nick
