pure64 Hoary

[Mike Hearn]

Hi,

I recently had a support ticket assigned to me from a Codeweavers
Crossover user who was on an x84-64 Hoary setup, and was having problems
because dlopen was not finding libcrypto.so.0.9.6  (for iTunes). You can
see the ticket here:

  http://www.codeweavers.com/site/support/tickets/browse/?ticket_id=47706

The user concerned said he had 32 bit compatibility libraries installed,
yet for some reason the version of libcrypto in /usr/lib appeared to not
be 32 bit. I was under the impression that 64 bit libs went in /usr/lib64
and the linker would automatically choose the right one. Am I wrong? Is
that Fedora specific?

Ryan pointed me to this page:

  http://digital-conquest.ath.cx/wiki/index.php/Ubuntu

which talks about "pure64" systems, a term I've never seen before. It
seems to imply that a pure64 system can actually have 32 bit compatibility
libraries installed, which doesn't sound very pure to me, but there
doesn't seem to be a good source of information on how 64-bit binaries are
being deployed in the Linux community. At least, I was unable to find one
and the Ubuntu Wiki doesn't seem to have a page specifically for it. Does
anybody know of a page which explains how the 32/64 sideloading system
works?

Is there any way to ensure that dlopen chooses 32 bit libraries? Is there
any better way packaging-wise we can handle this case (of users running a
32 bit program on a 64 bit distro)? 

Any advice much appreciated.

thanks -mike