Automatically installing 32-bit libraries on 64-bit machine? (RHEL3)

[Drew Leske]

Thanks Colin.  I had noticed that some libraries are installed for both, but 
some definitely are not.  One specific example is libGLU, provided by the 
XFree86-Mesa-libGLU package.

[root]# rpm -q glibc --queryformat "%{NAME} %{VERSION} %{RELEASE} %{ARCH}\n"
glibc 2.3.2 95.39 i686
glibc 2.3.2 95.39 x86_64
[root]# rpm -q XFree86-Mesa-libGLU --queryformat "%{NAME} %{VERSION} 
%{RELEASE} %{ARCH}\n"
XFree86-Mesa-libGLU 4.3.0 98.EL x86_64

Believe it or not our users require X libraries to run their numerical 
analysis (on non-interactive machines).  I wonder if only the 64-bit libGLU 
is provided because nobody saw a need to have both 32-bit and 64-bit 
versions of X available.

Can you suggest a way around this?  At this point it looks like I'll have to 
take care of this manually or script up my own solution--if the two flavours 
can even co-exist for some of these packages.

Thanks,
Drew.

Coe, Colin C. wrote:
> Under RHEL3&4, this happens automatically.
> 
> For example, querying the RPM database for info on the 'glibc' package
> gives:
> rpm -q glibc --queryformat "%{NAME} %{VERSION} %{RELEASE} %{ARCH}\n"
> glibc 2.3.4 2.19 i686
> glibc 2.3.4 2.19 x86_64
> 
> The 'up2date' utility will take care of this for you.
> 
> HTH
> 
> CC
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com
> [mailto:kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Drew Leske
> Sent: Tuesday, 27 June 2006 7:31 AM
> To: kickstart-list at redhat.com
> Subject: Automatically installing 32-bit libraries on 64-bit machine?
> (RHEL3)
> 
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> We're using KickStart for clusters and Linux deployment in general, and
> for 
> the most part we are happy with this.  Recently however we have acquired
> 
> some 64-bit machines to be added into our cluster and there are some
> issues 
> here.
> 
> We would like to make these resources available for 64-bit computing,
> and 
> have therefore installed primarily 64-bit libraries on them.  However,
> most 
> of our users run 32-bit applications.  At this point there is not enough
> 
> need for exclusively 64-bit machines, but I would like to make the
> platform 
> available.
> 
> According to a colleague there is a way with yum to specify that
> whenever 
> installing a package, a 32-bit version of the package, if available,
> will be 
> installed.  I am not familiar with yum and am limited to RHEL3, up2date,
> and 
> rpm, but this is the functionality I am looking for.
> 
> I have looked at the documentation for KickStart (RHEL3 and RHEL4) as
> well 
> as browser this mailing list for information, and of course I've
> searched 
> the web--nada.  Does anybody have any suggestions for how to handle
> this?
> 
> Thanks,
> Drew.
> 

-- 
Drew Leske :: Systems Group/Unix, Computing Services, University of Victoria
   dleske at uvic.ca / +1250 472 5055 (office) / +1250 588 4311 (cel)