[gentoo-amd64] Re: no-multilib and 32-bit chroot

[Duncan]

Jesús Guerrero posted on Sun, 20 Dec 2009 20:49:46 +0100 as excerpted:

> It's all about options. I find it cleaner to pursue the true multilib
> (as implemented in the multilib overlay) than to have to OSes just to
> run a few apps. That feels like having a Windows installation just to
> run a couple of games: hackish at best. But, as said, it's just a matter
> of opinions. There's no absolute best option, it depends on your tastes.
> This way you can get things like true DRM working no matter what kind of
> binary you are using.

Absolutely!  I realized some time ago that because I don't do closed 
source and most common FLOSS has already been ported, the chance of me 
needing 32-bit multilib was essentially nill -- with the exception of 
grub/lilo since amd64 continues to boot in 16-bit legacy mode, for legacy 
reasons (as long as the pc/mbr disk format stays around, at least, I 
understand EFI/GPT can handle direct 64-bit booting, or at least the 32-
bit portion is EFI and it can load 64-bit directly), if I wanted to 
continue actually compiling them from source.

But what I'm doing here isn't exactly multilib, but much more literally, 
taking advantage of the bi-arch/bi-bitness nature of amd64, to assemble a
32-bit image for my netbook on my generally WAY more powerful dual-dual-
core amd64 machine.  I'll continue to do all the Gentoo updates to the 32-
bit chroot on my main machine, and will likely eventually rsync the atom 
to the 32-bit chroot image.  Of course, I don't have to worry about that 
immediately, and I'm not -- I'm simply building the image right now, I've 
not even figured out what my partition layout's going to be on the atom.  
Once I get most stuff installed, I'll copy everything to a USB drive, 
setup grub and a temporary fstab on it, and boot from it on on the 
netbook/atom.  Once that's working correctly, I'll gdisk the atom's 120 
gig hd, mkreiserfs or perhaps experiment with btrfs on it, then copy the 
image over on to it, make it bootable, and go from there.  Only after 
/that's/ all working, and decide what I'm going to do with networking as 
well, will I need to worry about updating, and since I use 
FEATURES=buildpkg, I can simply copy the binpkgs to USB stick and 
"sneakernet" them until it's convenient to setup rsync or some such.

Of course that's going way beyond multilib, since it's fully imaged multi-
arch (tho I don't plan on ever making the 32-bit image on my main machine 
actually bootable -- I'd have to stick an entirely different mdraid 
config in grub, then figure out the partition to point root= at, to do 
that, and since I already have a second fully bootable 64-bit 
installation snapshot as a backup, there's little point in making the 32-
bit actually bootable on the main machine), but that's what's great about 
Gentoo and the 32-bit chroot feature documentation and support -- it's so 
flexible in that regard! =:^)

So definitely, it's all about options, and how Gentoo makes so many more 
of them reasonably easily available, especially compared to the standard 
but relatively limited bindists.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman