lubuntu-desktop team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

It feels mildly amusing that we are doing support for a member of the
Canonical Support team :)

On 12/22/2011 12:49 PM, Peter Matulis wrote:

>>  (a) Who or what installed ia32-libs, and for what purpose?
 
> My logs don't go back far enough to say for sure but I think it's
> because of this puppy:
> 
> ii  flashplugin-downloader:i386           11.1.102.55ubuntu0.11.10.1
>              Adobe Flash Player plugin downloader
> ii  flashplugin-installer                 11.1.102.55ubuntu0.11.10.1
>              Adobe Flash Player plugin installer
> 
> I know I installed the latter.  I guess the former got sucked in.


OK... that sort of makes sense.  On my Lucid amd64 desktop here I have
flashplugin64-installer, but that may well be from a PPA.

> This was originally Natty. I understand at that time there was no
> native 64-bit version of the flash plugin available.  I think there
> was a PPA package.  So now I have a ton of 32-bit packages
> installed:


> dpkg -l | grep :i386 | wc -l
> 124


Wow!  So it seems I was right about the i386 multiarch thing causing the
machine to become confused.  That many i386 packages installed on an
amd64 OS is definitely not normal, and IMO needs fixing.  You will
probably need to go through these and work out which of them you really
need/want to be i386, and which can (and should) be replaced with their
amd64 equivalents.

It would be interesting to see which of the list of packages aptitude
wanted to remove were i386; you might want to focus on getting those
replaced with amd64 equivalents first, and then tackle the rest of the
124 packages.

>>   (e) Lastly (this could generate a lot of output!), what is the output
>>       from:  aptitude -Wvs remove chromium-browser

 
> aptitude -Wvsy remove chromium-browser > remove_chromium-browser.txt
> This file is 20 MB.


I didn't realize it would be quite *that* much output!  Never mind.
Just work from the list of 124 i386 packages you generated earlier, and
see how much you can shrink that list down by removing them and then
adding their amd64 equivalents.  Boring work, but probably worth it to
clean up your system.

Overall, I think the cause of this issue is all the i386 packages on
your machine, and that aptitude is somehow trying to get rid of many of
them when you ask it to remove chromium-browser.

Jonathan