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Accepted
Matt
Asked: 2012-01-02 00:34:43 +0800 CST

Trouble compiling a 32 bit binary on a 64 bit machine

  • 772

I'm trying to compile a c program as a 32 bit binary instead of 64 bit. I started by just adding -m32 and got some errors. Googling around a little I came across a note to install ia32-libs. Running apt-get install ia32-libs resulted in a notification taht it was already installed and at the newest version.

There is a chain of libraries each one including the next until it fails:

/usr/include/features.h:323:26: fatal error: bits/predefs.h: No such file or directory

It seems to be including 32 bit versions of the other includes /usr/include/c++/4.6/x86_64-linux-gnu/32/bits/ ...

What am I missing?

32-bit

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Lekensteyn's answer conflicted with lots of existing packages for me (on 64-bit oneiric).

    I instead did this, which pulled in the libc6-dev-i386 package:

    sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib
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  2. ia32-libs just contains some compatibility libraries haven't been migrated yet to Multi Arch. For compiling 32-bit libraries, you need to install the 32-bit libraries and development files for C:

    sudo apt-get install libc6-dev:i386

    See also: Does the multiarch feature in 11.10 mean the death of force--architecture installs?

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  3. For those from future, this is a ten-year old question. Sadly none of the above solutions work for me.

    Here is a similar but rather new one How to compile 32-bit executable on 64 bit system, and the solution of this fresh post does solve my problem.

    Just install this:

    sudo apt install libc6-dev-i386
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