Every­body who runs an AMD64 Linux sys­tem might have seen these errors before:

I’m run­ning Ubuntu Linux and it is quite well known that some 32-bit apps refuse to start on an AMD64 (x86_64) sys­tem. Recently I’ve found out how to get Acrobat Reader and VMware star­ted, even with my nat­ive GTK2 theme.

After a sys­tem update yes­ter­day, Fire­fox crashes far too often. It crashes (seg­faults) everytime I reload a webpage. I assume that it is due to a sys­tem mis­con­fig­ur­a­tion on my behalf. Don’t actu­ally know.

Any­way, I wanted to install a new nightly snap­shot of Fire­fox today. No chance. The only thing the firefox-installer pro­gram returns is a bunch of error mes­sages (see above). After brows­ing some for­ums, mail­ing lists, and webpages, I finally found out how to get the 32-bit Fire­fox installed:

It is quite simple: In Ubuntu, there is a pango con­fig­ur­a­tion dir­ect­ory for 32-bit mod­ules in /etc/pango32/. Cre­ate a pangorc file in /etc/pango32/ with the fol­low­ing content:

Unfor­tu­nately, the Pango mod­ules in /usr/lib32/pango/1.4.0/ seem to be miss­ing in Ubuntu (breezy). You’ll have to copy them from another 32-bit system.

Next, ini­tial­ize the GTK\_PATH and PANGO\_RC\_FILE envir­on­ment vari­ables prior to run­ning Fire­fox (or the firefox-installer):

export GTK_PATH=/usr/lib32/gtk-2.0/
export PANGO_RC_FILE=/etc/pango32/pangorc

That’s it. Fire­fox will start nor­mally now — maybe with some addi­tional warn­ings. I haven’t checked if Thun­der­bird can be installed this way, too. I nev­er­the­less think so.

Update: Here’s a FAQ: http://wiki.debian.net/?DebianAMD64Faq

Update: Alex­an­dre Strube told me that breezy actu­ally con­tains all requires Pango lib­rar­ies. Maybe I was miss­ing some­thing. On his sys­tem, how­ever, some other funny phe­nomenon occurs — the but­tons have no bor­ders anymore: