Much ado about scripting, Linux & Eclipse: card subject to change

2010-01-12

Beyond Compare 3 for 64-bit ubuntu linux

Last week, I switched my xubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) box to Linux Mint 8 (Helena), to see how things had evolved in the past 18 months. Unfortunately, I also decided to switch from 32- to 64-bit, and of course not everything works the way it used to.

Luckily, the good folks at Scooter Software pointed me to this hack to allow their 32-bit Linux flavour of Beyond Compare 3 to find the 32-bit libraries it needs to run.

So, here's an updated version of that hack for ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala or Linux Mint 8 Helena:

  1. Download the i386 libqt3-mt .deb package into /tmp
  2. Download the latest Beyond Compare 3 .deb package into /tmp
  3. $ sudo su
  4. apt-get install ia32-libs
    cd /tmp; dpkg-deb --extract /tmp/libqt3-mt*.deb libqt3-mt
    cp -R libqt3-mt/usr/lib/* /usr/lib32; rm -fr /tmp/libqt3-mt
    dpkg -i --force-architecture /tmp/BCompareLinux*.deb

2 comments:

Adrian said...

Doesn't quite work on a fresh system - you also have to install the 64-bit version of libqt3-mt using the package manager, or dpkg won't allow you to install the bcompare packages as it's dependencies won't be met.

Other than that, thanks - there's such a mess of solutions to this problem on that forum thread, my own contributions included.

I tried this out on a fresh install in a VM and it worked after installing the amd64 package of libqt3-mt (after dpkg complained of it being missing). It's nice to have a verified procedure that works.

Would be even nicer to have a native 64-bit package though.. it's a shame that Scooter haven't found the resources to port BCompare off it's closed-source 32-bit dependencies but such is commercial reality - their major audience is Windows users. A pity that the Open Source world doesn't have anything quite so good ... pushes the other way though, there are some features in things like KDiff3, like the ability to use an external tool to generate alignment data, that I'd kill for in BCompare.

Unknown said...

I just tried your instructions on a 64bit Ubunto 9.10 system - works great! Thanks very much, you made my day!