How to install 32 bit and 64 bit applications on 64 bit Ubuntu OS

Earlier, with Drapper Drake , you only had to install ia32libs. But after that, may be they decided not to release for future versions, no more release. Hackers always find a way round to get their thing done and that exactly what happened with this as well. A bash file was written and released to the public available at http://frozenfox.freehostia.com/cappy/

I recently had to use this frequently and thought about mentioning it. In last two days, I had two such requirements of install 32 bit application on 64bit architecture comes in. Here in India, Tata Docomo’s USB installation binary, will work only on i386 linux boxes. I would admit that that itself is an achievement 🙂 But I had to get it working on a x64 architecture as well. And it was complaining about libqt and a few other 32 bit packages. dkpg’s –force-architecture option was also not working because of dependency issue.

This also helped me install a Task Management Software as well, http://codea-dev.com/gtd/download/linux/

Below text is copied from Ubuntu Forum’s. Author’s original post can be found at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=474790

getlibs works on:

• All Ubuntu and Debian systems
• Debian or Ubuntu based distributions (best to use the package name)

Tip: To install a 32-bit debian package for a program (not a library!) use

sudo dpkg -i --force-all package_name.deb

Usage Examples:

getlibs on a program to download all missing libraries:

getlibs /usr/bin/skype

—–

Use getlibs to install a 32-bit library using the library name:

getlibs -l libogg.so.0 libSDL-1.2.so.0

—–

Use getlibs to install a 32-bit library using the package name:

getlibs -p libqt4-core libqt4-gui

—–

Install a 32-bit library file (.deb):

getlibs -i ~/i386_library_1.deb

—–

Download and install a 32-bit library file (.deb):

getlibs -w http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/main/s/sdl-image1.2/libsdl-image1.2_1.2.5-3_i386.deb