I just installed the 64 bit live CD (11.2) to my hard drive (brand new never before booted Lenovo W500 PC) using the install icon. The very first thing I did after the 1st boot was go to the Software Manager via Computer>install software and it shows a “Changes:” box on the right with a zillion 32-bit packages - almost 700MB worth of stuff. So it looks like it wants to reinstall the whole system and add a ton of stuff that isn’t already installed. I can’t find a way to delete them from the Changes box (other than locate each one in some list, right click, undo, for each of the several hundred files). Can someone explain what is going on here? Why did it autoselect all this stuff and do I need to install all these 32 bit things?
It has been a long time since I messed with Linux so any explanation would be very helpful. I need this box (and distro) for my work so I really need to know that this Software Manager is not going to hose a completely fresh install. (Note that it did hose the system completely a couple of times when I just tried it from a USB key before the real install - I was hoping that all these selections were because it wasn’t a real install)
Since you did install from a CD you did not get all of the normal Suse packages. ( not enough room on a CD to hold them)
If a Library has -32 in it it is the 32 bit version of the library for the 64bit environment. ie if you need to run a 32 bit app without installing these it will not work. A simple example is Skype which is still only 32 bit so requires the -32 version of the libraries it uses.
Most likely, it is the pullin-flash pkg that is causing all those 32bit pkgs to be required. By default, openSUSE queues up the flash plugin for download the first time the software manager is run. And it is the 32 bit version of flash, along with nspluginwrapper, that is in the openSUSE repo. The 64-bit version of flash is in a separate developer repo.
If you delete pullin-flash and mark flash-player and nspluginwrapper as “never install”, I think you’ll get rid of all those 32-bit pkgs in the queue.
Of course, there could be other pkgs that are requiring other 32-bit dependencies, so if following the above instructions don’t work, you’ll just have to use the process of elimination.
Also, are you sure that all the 32bit packages total 700MB? There was a large KDE update released recently which came to a few hundred MB. That plus the volume of normal updates might be several hundred MB, accounting for most of the volume of updates. Those updates are normal unfortunately.
OK. Thanks everyone. I did install them and no harm done apparently. I’m still a bit confused by the software manager interface that has a list of items (updates) I can’t select or work with but that’s just a bad UI design. I was afraid I’d hit a more system wide issue (or at least one I didn’t understand).