On Dec 19, 2007 9:32 AM, Moshe Gorohovsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > What is the prevailing opinion about installing and running > 32-bit applications and shared libraries on 64-bit Linux > operating systems?
It's a perfectly okay thing to do. Naturally it's a waste of memory (cause you end up loading similar sets of libraries twice), but it's not a sin. Do Red Hat based 64-bit operating systems support 32-bit > applications and shared libraries, but Debian based 64-bit > operating systems do not? They both do. The 32-bit support is a kernel thing. IIRC, the userspace facilities are a bit different: RedHat stores the 32-bit programs in the same filesystem hierarchy as the 64-bit ones (/usr/lib vs. /usr/lib64) whereas Debian shelves 32-bit binaries away in some chroot. Also, at least as of two years ago, RPM supported installing multiple architecture versions of a package whereas APT/dpkg did not (but 64-bit Debian maintains the 32-bit stuff in a chroot so I guess it maintains separate dpkg databases for it).
