How do I install a 32-bit proprietary deb on a 64-bit system without causing dependency problems?

Warning:

The GuitarPro deb is dangerously packaged!

• On a 64-bit system, if you apt-get -f install after trying to install it, apt-get will want to remove the following system critical packages, which can ruin your Ubuntu installation!

  The following packages will be REMOVED:
  gksu guitarpro6:i386 libgksu2-0 libpam-gnome-keyring sudo ubuntu-desktop
  ubuntu-minimal update-manager update-notifier xauth xinit xorg

• sudo? update-manager?? X! What are the developers thinking?! It also makes apt-get think a bunch of i386 packages are installed when none have been. Here's the full gory pastebin.

Safely Install GuitarPro without apt-get wanting to remove it

• I believe the above behavior comes from the deb's dumb dependency on gksu:i386 (which is the graphical root elevation package)
• Unfortunately, the only safe way to install this and not have to deal with apt-get's whining is to manually install it and its dependencies. Here's how:

How to manually examine and safely install a binary i386 deb with its dependencies

• First, remove the current half-installed packaged with sudo dpkg --remove guitarpro:i386
• Now, change to the directory where your deb file is stored. For easy typing let's create a short symlink - my deb called gp6-full-linux-demo-r11100.deb, yours may differ:
  • ln -s gp6-full-linux-demo-r11100.deb gp6.deb

1. Examine the deb's architecture and dependencies

First, we examine the deb's dependencies without installing it.

• dpkg-deb -I gp6.deb shows us:

   new debian package, version 2.0.
  size 172147458 bytes: control archive= 75020 bytes.
   375 bytes,    10 lines      control
  
  335109 bytes,  2770 lines      md5sums
  
  Package: GuitarPro6
  Version: 6.1.3
  Section: non-free/audio
  Priority: optional
  Architecture: i386
  Depends: libc6 (>= 2.1.3), libstdc++6, libasound2, libxml2, libxslt1.1, libportaudio0, libportaudio2, libglu1-mesa, gksu, libssl0.9.8
  Installed-Size: 222632
  Maintainer: Arobas Music 
  Description: http://www.guitar-pro.com
  Guitar Pro 6, Linux Version.

• So this is an i386 application, and all its dependencies are also going to be i386.

• The first thing to do is install the ia32-libs i386 compatibility package, if you haven't already:
  • sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
• Let's also copy and paste the package's dependencies in a text file, for later.

2. "Extract" the deb into a tar archive and examine its contents

• Let's extract the deb to a tar archive now so we can examine its contents without having to install it:
  • dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile gp6.deb > gp6.tar

• And open up the File Manager (Nautilus), and mount the gp6.tar as an archive by right-clicking and selecting Open in Archive Mounter; after that you'll see gp6.tar added to the bottom the left sidebar, with an eject icon next to it:

  

• Go to the View Menu for File Manager, and change the Sidebar to the Tree view option instead of Places:

  

• Now expand the gp6.tar tree in the sidebar by clicking on the triangles; repeat for each level until you can see the folder structure of the file:

  

• From the structure, we see that the program's files go into two locations: /opt and /usr/share:

  • Anything that goes into /opt is self-contained and will not affect anything else on the system.
  • We see that /usr/share only contains icons/bitmaps, which are harmless.

3. If it's safe, "install" the program by extracting the tar file

• Go back to the terminal, and make sure you are in the directory containing the downloaded deb/tar files. Then type:

  sudo tar -C / -xvf gp6.tar
  

• This will extract the program files in the appropriate locations, showing you the file names and progress. (Sample Output)

  • The -C switch tells tar to perform this operation relative to the root directory, not the current directory.

4. Figure out which dependencies are missing with ldd, install them, and rock-and-roll!

• Open up the /opt/GuitarPro6 folder in the File Manager:

  

  • We see that the executable is called GuitarPro (with the diamond-"gears" icon), and also that a lot of lib-xxxx files are included in the folder.
  • This is normal for binary-only programs; they try to include the versions of the specific libraries they need, since those may not be available from the repositories of a specific distribution.

• Along with these included libraries and the ia32-libs package, most 32-bit dependencies should have been installed. Instead of blindly installing the dependencies we saw in the deb file info via apt-get--which can cause problems-- let's figure out if we're actually missing anything.

  • Go back to the terminal, and change to the GuitarPro directory with cd /opt/GuitarPro6

Using ldd

• Type ldd GuitarPro | grep found, and the output will be libportaudio.so.2 => not found

  • ldd prints the dependencies (shared libraries) of a program, and whether they exist or not on the system. Here's what the full output of GuitarPro looks like.
  • To make life easier, we simply filter for the ones that do not exist via grep found.

• Here, only the libportaudio2 library is missing. But the dependencies said libportaudio0? (see step 1.) Which is it??

  • Let's search for the available versions using apt-cache search libportaudio from the terminal.
  • That's tells us that both libportaudio2 and libportaudio0 packages are available. Let's install the 2 first, with

    sudo apt-get install libportaudio2:i386

  • The :i386 part is very important, since our program is 32-bit. If apt-get asks to replace/remove libportaudio2 and/or other files, that's OK, because some libraries cannot be installed simultaneously in both 32- and 64-bit versions.

• Let's double-check dependencies one final time: ldd GuitarPro6 | grep found gives us nothing (that's what we want!)

  • If you get the error ./GuitarPro: /opt/GuitarPro6/./libz.so.1: version ZLIB_1.2.3.3 not found (required by /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libxml2.so.2) this means that Guitar Pro is using a wrong version of libz, fix this by removing the libz.so.1 file from the GuitarPro6 directory:

    sudo rm libz.so.1

    Guitar Pro will fall back to the libz version of your system.

• Exit the terminal and go back to the /opt/GuitarPro6 folder in the File Manager. Double-click GuitarPro and...

  

• Clean-up the Download folder by deleting the tar file from the File Manager.

5. The launcher shortcut has already been added

• Because the package already contained a GuitarPro6.desktop shortcut that was extracted to /usr/share/applications, there is no need to manually create one. It's sitting there in the Launcher:

  

I tried something out and got it to work!

1. I copied "/opt/GuitarPro6" somewhere.

2. I did sudo apt-get -f install to remove Guitar Pro.

3. I copied the folder back into /opt/GuitarPro6 and replaced everything there.

4. I installed more packages as follows:

   sudo apt-get install dconf-gsettings-backend python-levenshtein python-indicate libav-tools libstartup-notification0 libxmuu1 libavfilter-extra-2 libbabl-0.0-0 libgegl-0.0-0 libgconf2-4 python-vobject libgtk-3-0 libpam-cap python-utidylib libdconf0 python-iniparse python-xmpp libpam-gnome-keyring libxcb-util0 python-farstream
   

5. I downloaded this image GuitarPro icon and saved it in /opt/GuitarPro6/icon.png so i could have an image to create my own .desktop file.

6. I created a .desktop file with sudo gedit:

   #!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
   
   [Desktop Entry]
   Type=Application
   Name=Guitar Pro 6
   Comment=Guitar Pro 6
   Icon=/opt/GuitarPro6/icon.png
   Exec=sh /opt/GuitarPro6/gp-launcher.sh
   Terminal=false
   Categories=Audio
   

   I saved this file into /usr/share/applications with the name GuitarPro6.desktop.

Now everything works and I can find Guitar Pro in the dash.

I've also been struggling with this over the past few days. I've found the best way is to use the Windows executable under wine. Seems a lot more solid.

To answer your question, to stop apt-get -f install from removing software you need to add --no-remove to the command you run. This will immediately abort the apt-get run if something is to be removed and your software will not be removed.

However, what you are probably looking for is a way to have a system run normally, yet also have that software installed. What you will need to do is look at the output from when you forces the installation of the package with dpkg, and see what it is failing on, then install that dependency using

apt-get install package-name

In your case, it is gksu (specifically, gksu). Now you may find that when you attempt to install gksu that it has dependencies as well that need to be installed. Since you are forcing the 32-bit package install, you will need to manually install these dependencies using the same command above.

I simply installed gp6 under LinuxMint 14 32-Bit, ran updater and fixed issues with zlib by copying zlib.so1.2.27 to /opt/GuitarPro, renaming it to zlib.so.1, installed gksu and its dependencies, ran the updater again for bringing all up to date. Afterwards i connected my 64-bit Linux to 3s-Bit Linux via fish://username@mymachineIP/opt in Dolphin and copied the whole GuitarPro6 dir to my home dir on 64-Bit Linux and from there to /opt. Works.

Try this:

Download from http://www6.guitar-pro.com/en/index.php?pg=download the .deb file but don't install it.

Download and install getlibs Then:

sudo apt-get install libportaudio0
getlibs -l libportaudio.so.2
dpkg -i –force-all /path/to/GuitarPro6Demo2.deb

Finally, launch it with (ignore errors):

/opt/GuitarPro6/gp-launcher.sh