A while back, I wrote about using an x86_64 kernel on an i686 userland. After using this setup for a while, I began to discover that it is not that user friendly to have to use linux32 in front many commands. In particular, when building software the ./configure needs to be prefixed with it and bash can not handle creating an alias to transparently do that. Also, I would need to make aliases for all build tools I could encounter (make, cmake, qmake, …), which is almost an impossible task.

In true Baldrick style, I came up with a cunning plan… What if I called my shell with a linux32 prefix and then my system would think it was always an i686 one. I only need my system to think it is an x86_64 when I enter an x86_64 chroot, so that is much easier to create aliases to deal with. The trick was to create a /bin/bash32 file containing:

#!/bin/bash
linux32 /bin/bash -l "$@"

Then add bash32 to the list of shells in /etc/shells and use “chsh -s bash32” to start using it.

After using this setup for several weeks, the only issue I notice is that when using chroot, it will look for /bin/bash32 in the chroot and likely fail. That can be fixed by prefixing with the SHELL environmental variable pointing at an appropriate shell (more than likely /bin/bash). I am sure that creating a wrapper script to handle that would be easy but using chroots via the Arch devtools does not suffer from this problem so I have not looked into it further.