Hi,

for an legacy app from last century I have to run a 32 bit version of firebird classic (only 32 bit
UDFs available).

I have tried several approaches and everything is fine in a virtual machine, however I would like to
avoid the overhead and like to run FB directly on the host, which is a Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit.

There are are two possible directions here directly installing 32 bit binaries and a chroot -
usually running 32 bit apps on 64 bit Ubuntu 12.04 (or a Debian system) is not a problem, so I tried
this first.

Unfortunately installing the i386 packages for firebird fails - both the ubuntu repos and the
ppa:mapopa give me dependency conflicts - please see shell output copied below [1].

How can I fix this?

Thanks for your attention!
John

[1] rewrapped shell output:

root@srv01:/etc# aptitude install firebird2.5-classic:i386
The following NEW packages will be installed:
firebird2.5-classic:i386{b} firebird2.5-common{a} firebird2.5-common-doc{a}
firebird2.5-server-common:i386{a} libc6:i386{a} libfbclient2:i386{a} libfbembed2.5:i386{a}
libgcc1:i386{a} libicu48:i386{ab} libstdc++6:i386{a}
The following packages are RECOMMENDED but will NOT be installed:
libib-util:i386
0 packages upgraded, 10 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 15.6 MB of archives. After unpacking 43.8 MB will be used.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libicu48 : Conflicts: libicu48:i386 but 4.8.1.1-3ubuntu0.1 is to be installed.
libicu48:i386 : Conflicts: libicu48 but 4.8.1.1-3ubuntu0.1 is installed.
firebird2.5-classic:i386 : Depends: netbase:i386 which is a virtual package.
Depends: firebird2.5-classic-common:i386 (= 2.5.2.26540.ds4-8ubuntu4)
but it is not going to be installed.
Depends: openbsd-inetd:i386 but it is not going to be installed. or
inet-superserver:i386 which is a virtual package.

The following actions will resolve these dependencies:

Keep the following packages at their current version:
1) firebird2.5-classic:i386 [Not Installed]
2) firebird2.5-server-common:i386 [Not Installed]
3) libfbembed2.5:i386 [Not Installed]
4) libicu48:i386 [Not Installed]


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