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After migrating a Debian 7.6 system from i368 to amd64 I encountered the problem to use some older ELF 32-bit LSB executables. Of course, there is the possibility to setup a secondary 32-bit system (in fact I could use my old one) and to apply chroot(8) or schroot(1). But I do not like the additional admin effort, the performance loss by a wrapper program and a different command sequence.

I am wondering whether there is really no way to run a 32-bit application directly on the x86_64 architecture (as possible, e.g., for HP-UX 11.0)? Both

$ /home/alf/prog32

and

$ /usr/bin/linux32 /home/alf/prog32

just lead to the failure message /home/alf/prog32: file or directory not found. This behavior is observed for all ELF 32-bit LSB executables (Debian i386, downloaded, self-written and compiled C-programs).

vsnprintf
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  • `ENOENT` is not the error code you should get when executing an unsupported binary. – Brian Cain Sep 30 '14 at 20:58
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    You need to have a complete set of 32-bit shared libraries for the executable to load; there's no way around the "additional admin effort". – Ben Voigt Sep 30 '14 at 21:01
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    Odd...my linux boxes seem to have a mix of 32- and 64-bit apps, and i don't even remember having to configure it. Is there something weird about Debian, or about the app you're trying to run? – cHao Sep 30 '14 at 21:01
  • Try writing the absolute path to your 32 bit executable like /directory1/directory2/prog32 or /usr/bin/linux32 /directory1/directory2/prog32 and then show us the error. As Brian says the error you should get is different. – Sergio Ayestarán Sep 30 '14 at 21:03
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    http://stackoverflow.com/a/5239573/1163019 – auselen Sep 30 '14 at 21:42
  • Thanks @auselen. With `apt-get install libc6:i386 libX11:i386` (a passable admin effort) the old 32-bit executable gets working. I really had no idea that a missing `/lib/i386-linux-gnu/ld-linux.so.2` could cause the reported `ENOENT` error. – vsnprintf Sep 30 '14 at 22:12
  • http://askubuntu.com/questions/359156/how-do-you-run-a-32-bit-program-on-a-64-bit-version-of-ubuntu – Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com Nov 07 '15 at 08:29

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