Developing 32 bit apps under FC2 x86_64

[Ka-Spel]

I just bought a dual processor Opteron a week or two ago and am still trying to get all the wrinkles worked out on it. I am trying to develop some software to run on it, but I am using some proprietary libraries that are only in i386 format. When I try to link those libraries in with the FC2 libraries such as TCL or Open Motif, it exits because they are incompatible. If it is a 32 bit app, then the TCL libraries can't be found. If it is 64 bit, then the proprietary libraries can't be found.

My question is, how does one setup a machine that would allow me to develop both 32bit and 64bit applications? I would need to have both 32bit and 64bit versions of most/all of the libraries, but that doesn't seem to be included with FC2. Do I have to install everything twice, by myself? And if I tried to do that, would the 32 bit and 64 bit rpms try to uninstall each other?

Thanks

[Bana]

From http://www.linuxtx.org/amd64faq.html:

Can I develop for both x86_64 and i386 on the same machine?
Generally speaking, this should not be a problem just build with '-m32'. The way biarch works in theory, means that both 32bit and 64bit libs are installed concurrently (/lib and /lib64), and libtool helps to ensure that the right thing is done behind the scenes. In practice however this can get a bit messy, with some lib packages including arch specific bits in /etc or /usr/bin, resulting in rpm conflicts, and unexpected behavior. If you plan on doing a reasonable amount of biarch development, one solution I have been fairly happy with is setting up a dual boot. Once both arch are installed as listed, you can remain running in 64bit, and simply build in a chroot/setarch to your 32bit root. This also holds the advantage of having an option for playing 32bit 3D games when you need to blow off steam and 64bit versions are not available. In practice I really do not boot into 32bit mode, but the chroot does ensure I have everything I need for building 32bit packages if one of my 32bit machines are not available

I think it will help if you look into libtool as well for managing your libraries:

I notice some RPMS are installed twice, how do I handle multilib?
A few things of note here:
* rpm and yum both support name-version-release.arch so for installing foo-1.1-1 RPMs, you can explicitly call rpm -ivh foo-1.1-1.i386 foo-1.1-1.x86_64. You can also query and remove with this method. yum will default to the system architecture if given a choice, so to install say 32bit firefox where you have both 32bit and 64bit available in your repositories, you can call 'yum install firefox.i386' and it should do the right thing.

* At this time, apt is *not* biarch compatible, but I am told this is being addressed.

* libtool in Fedora releases is patched to handle multilib systems appropriatelyr. While this patch has been pushed upstream, it may not be in all distributions yet. If you are building an rpm or a tarball you may need to libtoolize, even if the libtool scripts are already there. Try without first, but if the build is looking for things in /*lib you might try the following before running configure (in %prep for rpm specs) as the easy fix:

libtoolize --force
aclocal --force
automake --add-missing
autoconf
autoheader

HTH

[chadrico]

Could I use this method to run 32 bit NDiswrapper with my broadcom driver in a 64 bit enviroment?

[|znogooD]

I found the reason wky this did not work. lib-tools . You nees that to run 32bit programs! Thanks for all help