Virtual World Linux Users : 32bit Support Is Back on Ubuntu =>14.04 Based 64bit Distro's ?

By Avatar JayR Cela

    Ok so according to the title of this post, 32bit compatibility is back in the 64bit Ubuntu Based Linux world of things, so what does that mean ? To a number of people absolutely nothing, unless of course you just so happen to be using one of the SecondLife Third Party Viewers that just so happen to offer both 32 and 64bit flavors for download.

    Well up until just recently if your travels, or adventures in the Linden Lab virtual world of SecondLife, and you are a Linux user, and require the use of physic's ( boating, aircraft flying, auto racing, motor biking, sporting event's etc... ) and are on an Ubuntu or Debian offshoot distribution, and using 64bit, you were SOL trying to take advantage of the built in Havok Physic's engine which currently as licensed and implemented by LL is 32bit only. Forcing you to use the non Havok 64bit version of said TPV(s)

    Ubuntu stopped supporting the old ia32libs in the 64bit release's back around version 12.10 or 13.04, they also switched to a new lib and update structure ( MultiArch & SystemD ) unfortunately things did not work out very well at first, quite a few 32bit programs simply refused to run. To make a long story short, the other night i noticed a rather large number of 32bit libs being added during a routine update procedure, being curious I decided to take another stab at running the UkanDo TPV for SecondLife, ( a 32bit only viewer ) low and behold it actually worked, FireStorm, Singularity, Kokua, CoolVL and LL's official viewer all worked as well, where as the last time I tried ( just a week ago ) nothing, nadda, zip zilch. What really surprised me was I have not read anything about this issue in a while, at least since the initial uproar from within the Ubuntu community forums last year.

    As a side note I should mention that I am not on Pure Ubuntu 14.04, I use KXStudio 14.04 a hybrid that combines both Ubuntu and Debian repositories, ( soon to be a straight Debian distro sometime early next year ) so your results may be different than mine.

JayR Cela