在64位linux上安装python 32位

Question

I basically have two questions:

1. How do you install 32bit python alongside 64bit python on linux?
2. How do I fix my broken system from the failed attempt below?

I just tried to install 32bit python alongside my 64bit python on linux mint 16. It's not as straight forward as I hoped for (something like sudo apt-get install python32 would be nice) but after a bit of googling I downloaded python 2.7.6 and did the following:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs gcc-multilib checkinstall
CC="gcc -m32" LDFLAGS="-L/lib32 -L/usr/lib32 -Lpwd/lib32 -Wl,-rpath,/lib32 -Wl,-rpath,/usr/lib32" ./configure --prefix=/opt/pym32
make
sudo checkinstall

The should supposedly make me able to run 32bit og 64bit (default) like this:

python -c 'import sys; print sys.maxint'
/opt/pym32/bin/python -c 'import sys; print sys.maxint'

... but /opt/pym32/ wasn't even created. Worse, my system now reports 29 broken dependencies, indicating that the new python replaced the old one or something like that. To fix it, aptitude suggests that I remove a whole bunch of packages that I need and install a whole bunch of packages that I don't need.

I used checkinstall rather than make install to be able to reverse/uninstall if something went wrong, but uninstalling/reinstalling python won't work because of the broken dependencies. Is there a way to get out of this mess?

Answer 1

I think you should use a virtual environment and install a different python version in it. Check this answer for better understanding --> Is it possible to install another version of Python to Virtualenv?

Answer 2

You might be better off building your own RPM. You could even automate it by pulling the latest version (or the one you want). Then you could set your own dependancies. Install the 64 bit to keep your dependancies sane.