[Gllug] Debian 32/64 bitness (was Memory usage)

[Martin A. Brooks]

Doug Winter wrote:
> packaging from everyone else.  They've adopted a much more complex
> scheme (multiarch), that isn't actually working yet (yay debian :).

IWFM.

I even have nasty proprietary 32 bit stuff like Skype running just fine.

There are actually 2 methods Debian uses to support 32 bit apps.  The 
first is the previously mentioned 32 bit chroot.  The second (and more 
elegant, imo) is using a wrapper called "linux32" to set the execution 
domain.  i.e.  'linux32 /path/to/your/32bitbinary'.

As near as I can work out, the wrapper intercepts library calls and maps 
them into a /emul/ directory which contains 32 bit versions of the libs 
called by the executing 32 bit program.

The only bit that's really a pest is when $random_app requires a lib 
that isn't provided for by the ia32-libs package.  Then you have to find 
a 32 bit version yourself (or grab the debian package containing said 
lib) and them manually drop it into the appropriate place under /emul. 
If you're using a debian package you can just unpack it to /emul and it 
sorts all that out for you.





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