Pursuant to my earlier frustration with building and running 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit Linux installation, I have returned to the chroot suggestions set forth in the comments section for that post. I found the DebootstrapChroot HOWTO on the Ubuntu Wiki which seems to be a fairly authoritative solution. Except that it didn’t work right for the many times I was trying to set it up some weeks ago.

I finally got the 32-bit chroot to work tonight. Thus, I am working to migrate the 8 x86_32 configurations over from the VMware machine. All of the gcc versions work when transplanted directly (2.95.3, though, is only happy living in the same path where it originally resided). I am rebuilding a new version of gcc-svn for x86_32 (no reason to migrate an old version when I am constantly updating from gcc SVN anyway). I could probably migrate the Intel C compiler wholesale, but it would probably be better to take this opportunity to finally upgrade from .15 to .17 in the 10.1 series, at least until Carl Eugen Hoyos gives the all-clear to upgrade to the later series (last I heard, it can’t handle the FFmpeg source).

For my future reference, as well as for the benefit of other confused Ubuntu users, I am documenting how I managed to set up the 32-bit chroot environment. I started with the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebootstrapChroot and found them to be mostly accurate but in the wrong order in some places. Mostly, it had to do with the mount points and when to activate them. The original Wiki describes chrooting as root, performing a bunch of apt-get package maintenance (section: “Setting up your chroot with debootstrap”), and only sometime later (section: “Getting stuff (…) working automagically”) setting up special mount points. Then later on (section: “Setting up a dchroot (non-root) environment”), the document recommends replacing the earlier mount points with a new set. Following those instructions in that order always left me with a confused and corrupted chroot setup. I solved the problem by setting up the second set of mount points before performing the initial package maintenance (and never using the first set).

Also, I found it very useful and bandwidth-saving to make a backup copy (‘cp -a /var/chroot/intrepid /var/chroot/fresh.intrepid’) after the cursory debootstrap command. Just in case, you know, it doesn’t work out quite right the first, second, … tenth time, you won’t have to wipe the chroot directory and download all the packages again from scratch.