[plug] AMD64 Debian Box3N :D

[Daniel Foote]

> >>Why the chroot? SuSE supports both 32- and 64-bit applications
> >>"transparently" on the same root.
>
> > Debian is a little more complicated than that. They are working on a
> > "multiarch" solution that will fix all this up.
>
> So is this (the need for chroot) just a result of the package management
> problem?
>
> Or is it something more fundamental, like the link-loader?

I think it's more the package management. The Debian AMD64 guys didn't
want to rewrite the build rules for all the lib packages to make them
install into lib64. (ie, its not an APT limitation, it's just a lot of
work that would have to be repeated and would "muddy the waters" with
respect to many packages.) I don't think it's an issue with the link
loader, as it's the same one used by other Linux distros, and they
seem to work like this.

You can install an ia32-libs package, which will allow many binary
programs to run in the normal root. It doesn't contain lots of
libraries, so not everything will run with it. But it does allow many
32 bit binary only packages to work, such as Quake 4 and Doom 3. There
is also an ia32-libs-dev package, to allow building of some 32 bit
packages, too.

For a list of what the ia32libs includes, view the package contents
with this link:
http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_contents.pl?searchmode=filelist&word=ia32-libs&version=unstable&arch=amd64&page=1&number=all
That will give you an idea of what things will run with it.

Daniel