Just in case anybody ever wondered, there's nothing stopping someone from doing the 32-bit chroot (as in the gentoo/amd64 documentation) on a no-multilib system. In fact, it's a cleaner way to do it, since the two systems will be fully separated, no 32-bit stuff on the 64-bit side, and no 64-bit stuff on the 32-bit side, plus no generic 32-bit binary-only emul-linux-x86 libs to worry about.
The one caveat is to make sure you have the kernel set to handle 32-bit also (in menuconfig, under executable file formats, ia32 emulation), but that's needed for grub-static anyway, I believe, so no big deal there. I've been running no-multilib for quite some time and definitely prefer it on the 64-bit side. But I've had a netbook (Acer Aspire One, from before they went with the freedomware crippled poulsbo chipset) that only does 32-bit, and I'm finally getting around to sticking Gentoo on it. So I did the 32-bit chroot stuff to build the image for it as my main machine is far faster, tho I wasn't sure if it was going to require at least a 32-bit glibc and ld/linker (and thus multilib) on the main system or not. I thought it /should/ be fine, tho, and was correct. All it needs is the standard 32-bit chroot stuff. Just setup the initial dir, unpack the 32-bit stage-3, and setup the mounts as outlined in the chroot guide, and the linux32 chroot /file/system /bin/bash command works as it should. Since I'm doing it as a full system setup to be transferred to my netbook later, not just the usual chroot stuff, I had a bit more to do than the guide mentioned, and the x86 handbook installation section wasn't quite right for me either, tho I followed it relatively closely except that I haven't configured fstab or grub yet, and of course didn't partition the disk since that was already setup on my main machine. I'll have to do that later, when load the image on a thumbdrive, boot the thumbdrive on the netbook, and then use it to setup partitioning, etc, on the netbook's drive (I got the 120 gig conventional magnetic platter SATA, not the SSD). FWIW, I just got thru with an emerge --emptytree @system and am now doing an emerge --emptytree @selected for the few world packages I have, after updating @system to gcc 4.4.2 (~x86) just previous to emerging --emptytree @system. I still have to add most of world, including xorg, kde, icecat, etc. I'm figuring I'll have a Christmas present for myself, tho. =:^) That's including both finishing the build, and the final setup on the netbook too, I hope. -- 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
