WARNING * WARNING * WARNING * WARNING * WARNING * WARNING * WARNING * WARNING

This been poorly tested and is very much a work in progress.

Use at your own risk.

WARNING * WARNING * WARNING * WARNING * WARNING * WARNING * WARNING * WARNING

Using 64-bit Binaries on 32-bit Slackware

In order to use and compile 64-bit software on 32-bit Slackware, you will have to replace your gcc and glibc packages with multilib versions, or else install 'compat64' packages for gcc and glibc that add the 64-bit binaries for these packages. You can not just take the binaries from a 64bit Slackware. Instead, the 'compat64' versions of the gcc and glibc packages will have to be compiled on the 32bit system.

You will also need to install several supporting 64-bit libraries. These libraries can be taken from the 64-bit Slackware of the same version as your 32-bit Slackware. To make things easier for you, this package contains two scripts:

convertpkg-compat64
massconvert64.sh

The first script converts a single 64-bit Slackware package into a 'compat64' package that can be installed on 32-bit Slackware. The second script will do the hard work for you: it contains an internal list of Slackware packages that you will need for a functional multilib 32-bit Slackware. The script will convert these packages to 'compat64' packages. All that the script needs is a single command-line argument: the path to a local 64-bit Slackware package tree (this is the directory below which you find 'a', 'ap', ... 'y' subdirectories).

You will also need qemu-x64 installed, so that you can run 64-bit binaries on a 32-bit kernel. (This does work, despite allegations to the contrary, though it is certainly not as fast as running 32 binaries on a 64 bit kernel natively.)

Building 64-bit binaries on 32-bit Slackware

In order to compile 64-bit software when the full set of multilib binaries is installed, all that you need is adding "-m64" to the compiler flags. Quite a few build systems however insist on adding -m32, regardless of what you tell it. For this reason, the package installs a few scripts to enforce 64-bit builds. To load them into your path (including wrappers around gcc) you only need to run the following command in your bash shell:

. /etc/profile.d/64dev.sh

Note the single dot followed by a space: this is the 'source' command which will set the various variables in your current shell environment. Do not forget to exit from your shell (and login again) after you have finished compiling your 64-bit software, to get rid of the 64-bit-enforcing environmental variables!

Additionally, if you compile any 64-bit binaries that conflict with 32-bit versions, they should be installed into bin/64/, not bin/.

A typical invocation of the 'configure' command as an example:

. /etc/profile.d/64dev.sh
./configure \
  --prefix=/usr \
  --bindir=/usr/bin/64

Keeping your multilib environment up to date

The third-party program compat32pkg is able to keep 32-bit on 64-bit multilib packages up to date for Slackware64. It works similarly to slackpkg for regular Slackware. See compat32pkg.sourceforge.net. [However, no such program yet exists for 32-bit Slackware, to the best of my knowledge. -therealbstern]

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Originally by Eric Hameleers alien@slackware.com 15-Nov-2010

Minor modifications by Ben Stern bas-github@fortian.com 23-Mar-2018

Licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, except for qemu-binfmt-conf.sh, which is based upon QEMU's script of the same name, and is licensed under the GPL version 2.