How to Install 32-bit Packages on 64-bit CentOS

32bit-64bitcentos

We have a lot of 32-bit CentOS 6 servers with custom rpms built for i386 and i686 architectures in our own RPM repos.

We now have some 64-bit CentOS 6 servers, but would like to be able to install the 32-bit packages from the 32-bit repos.

I know that Debian supports "multiarch" that allows one to install 32-bit libraries and packages. What is the CentOS equivalent?

Best Answer

The way all the major repos solve this is to actually copy the relevant 32-bit packages into the 64-bit repository. You can see this from a careful inspection of any such repo (CentOS, Fedora, etc.).

So, after you copy all the 32-bit packages to the 64-bit repo and re-run createrepo --update ... you should be able to install them. Since this can use a lot of space, I suggest hard linking them rather than copying them.

CentOS repository package listing

Related Solutions

Centos – Reinstalling YUM on CentOS via RPM

Somewhere in /etc/issue the version of CentOS you're dealing with will be shown, and the arch will come from uname -m.

As for yum itself, do not use rpm to reinstall it, but rather use rpm2cpio and cpio to extract the files from the packages and then let yum fix up the rpmdb after the fact. Download the yum and centos-release packages and then:

cd /
rpm2cpio /path/to/yum-....rpm | cpio -id
rpm2cpio /path/to/centos-release-....rpm | cpio -id

Repeat until you have all the packages needed to get yum back in place.

Redhat – RHEL 6 x64: running 32 bit applications

The fix in RHEL6 or in derivatives of RHEL6 is to add the parameter multilib_policy=all in your /etc/yum.conf file and that should work out.

It will enable fetching packages of all architectures and is not limited to the 64 bit versions only.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Centos – Reinstalling YUM on CentOS via RPM

Redhat – RHEL 6 x64: running 32 bit applications

Related Topic