Fedora 9 x86_64 system compiling for i386

[John Burton]

I have a MacBook Pro with Core 2 Duo processors (64bit). I originally 
had a straight install of Fedora 8 on it, which worked fine. My first 
mistake was trying to upgrade to Fedora 9. It had problems upgrading 
basic packages. Then I tried a clean install of Fedora 9 (backup / 
format / install). I had better luck getting a functional system, but 
now I've run into another roadblock....

I use my laptop as a development platform in a network with a mix of 
i386 and x86_64 linux boxes. On the current project I'm working on, we 
develop for the "lowest common denominator", which is i386. Other 
projects we compile to x86_64 so I need to be able to do both relatively 
transparently. The libraries for the current project are on our network 
fileserver and are i386. With fedora 8 this was no problem whatsoever - 
I just use the "-m32" switch when compiling on my machine and everything 
worked. With Fedora 9 the first hint of disaster was an error message

"/usr/include/gnu/stubs.h:7:27: error: gnu/stubs-32.h: No such file or 
directory"

Okay, so for whatever reason, the i386 compatibility libraries / 
includes / whatever weren't installed. I go to install them and guess 
what, there is no such animal in any of the fedora 9 repositories. Doing 
a little more research, I find that the "gnu/stubs" files are in 
glibc-headers. Fedora 9 uses version 2.8.3 for x86_64. I find the 
glibc-headers-2.8.3.i386.rpm file on RPMFIND. When I try to install it, 
many of the files conflict with ones from glibc-headers-2.8.3.x86_64.rpm.

How can I compile and link C, C++, and FORTRAN code for the i386 
architecture on my x86_64 machine. It used to work fine under Fedora 8, 
but now seems completely broken under Fedora 9. Also, why was this 
distribution released when it can't even upgrade from a plain vanilla 
Fedora 8 x86_64 installation to a plain Fedora 9 x86_64 installation - 
instead of a simple upgrade, I had to do a clean install. I've used 
Redhat / Fedora distributions since the first Redhat distribution came 
out and I've never had this much trouble upgrading...

John