Ubuntu... downgrade? (64-bit -> 32-bit)

[Benjamin Scott]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 11:40 PM, Ken D'Ambrosio <ken at jots.org> wrote:
> Hmmm... might be worth looking into.  I mean, what's the worst that
> happens?  I bork my system, and wind up doing a re-install.  Which is what
> I'm looking at, anyway.  So, yeah -- I'll poke around and see what I can
> make happen.

  I have an idea I've been turning over in my head which may be
applicable here, too: Set up another installation in a directory
branch.  In your case, maybe under "/usr/ubuntu-i386/" or something
like that.

  The reason I want to do this is so I can get certain things from
Debian "unstable" to install (with all their library dependencies)
without having to run my entire system on unstable.[1]

  One way to do this would be to bootstrap an installation in a VM or
a chroot, but that's a bit heavy-handed.

  I've been fiddling with using arguments to apt-get/dpkg to change
the root directory for that invocation, e.g.:

	sudo apt-get -o 'RootDir=/usr/unstable' update

  That problem I have is that I haven't found the magic needed to
initialize an apt installation.  It rightly complains that its data
files are missing, but I don't know any way to create them.  With RPM,
it's "rpm --initdb".  Anyone know how to do it in APT-land?

-- Ben

[1] For example, Debian "lenny" ships a rather buggy release of
Audacious.  But installing a backport would require replacing half my
system, including libc.  Might as well just run unstable as the main
system.  Building from source requires building a ton of other
libraries as well.