My kid hates Linux (ZDNet) [LWN.net]

My kid hates Linux (ZDNet)

Posted Apr 14, 2008 20:46 UTC (Mon) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)
In reply to: My kid hates Linux (ZDNet) by lamby
Parent article: My kid hates Linux (ZDNet)

I'm not trying to run non-free software, as I've discussed above.  My entire build environment
is free (gcc/binutils/glibc/etc.)  But it is a ginormous pain in the rear to get it working
properly on Debian and Ubuntu, involving a lot of hand-editing of linker scripts, creating
symlinks in system directories, etc.  It works fine on Red Hat.  Should I have to spend time
building two completely different versions of this complex environment, one for 32bit hosts
and one for 64bit hosts, just because Debian can't get multilib right?  I don't have the time
or energy for either alternative.  So far I've just been forced to (sadly) say you have to use
Red Hat, or else figure it all out for yourself.

And when you say "*actually* constructive", what exactly did you have in mind, since according
to that bug the patches have been there since last June, and yet the last message posted to
that bug was in July 2007?  Somehow "hey, please get going and fix this" doesn't seem to meet
the definition of "constructive", but given the situation I can't think of anything else.

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32-bit under 64-bit kernel in Debian

Posted Apr 20, 2008 14:03 UTC (Sun) by lipak (subscriber, #43911) [Link]


> But it is a ginormous pain in the rear to get it working properly on
> Debian and Ubuntu, involving a lot of hand-editing of linker scripts,
> creating symlinks in system directories, etc.

I use Debian. I followed the instructions on wiki.debian.org to set
up "schroot" to create a complete 32-bit environment inside a machine
running a 64-bit kernel. I have not had any problems with this 32-bit
environment.

The only drawbacks are:
 a. This must first be set up by the super user. (It can be used by
 other users).
 b. It takes up the space of two installations on the system.

However, the "schroot" tool is a great one and after I learned to use
it I have found it is also convenient to run binaries from different
Debian distributions (stable/testing/unstable/experimental) on the
same machine at the small cost of additional disk space utilisation.

I read this thread a bit late and was surprised to find that no one
mentioned it!

Kapil.
--

32-bit under 64-bit kernel in Debian

Posted Apr 22, 2008 5:06 UTC (Tue) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

It's utterly ridiculous to go to all this trouble and use this kind of thing every time I want
to compile some code.  If Debian just implemented multilib the way the LSB standard requires,
it would not be necessary (at least not for my purposes).