Running Electraft utilities on Linux amd64 and multiarch

Posted by Nate Bargmann on Sun, Jul 31, 2016

At this time the Elecraft utilities for Linux are only available as i386 32 bit precompiled binaries.  Other architectures such as amd64 or armhf (Raspberry Pi) must use another means, if possible.  The Debian Linux distribution and its derivatives (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Etc.) and forks (Devuan which I now run) have the capability to enable “multiarch” which allows running i386 32 bit binaries on an amd64 installation as a native application.

The following is a rough guide to set up an amd64 based installation to run i386 binaries.  The first step is to enable multiarch (if not already done so when the system was installed) by following the Debian Multiarch HOWTO.

After enabling the i386 architecture, aptitude shows about 24000 new packages the reason being is that now there are many packages available in both amd64 and i386 versions.

After some checking with the ldd system utility, I found that the following packages need to be installed:

libstdc++6:i386
libgtk2.0-0:i386

These pull in additional packages they depend on if a smart installer such as apt-get or aptitude are used.

The help functionality is not available without the installation of the following package:

libgtkhtml-4.0-0:i386

I currently cannot install this package on my present system, Devuan Jessie 1.0 Beta, due to a dependency error with the libgtkhtml-4.0-common:i386 package being unavailable.

As I use the Clearlook-Phenix theme on my Xfce desktop, I needed to install the following package for the Elecraft utilities to use this theme:

gtk2-engines:i386

Beyond the Help viewer issue noted above, I cannot view the release notes in the K3 utility but can view them in the P3 utility.  I store the firmware files in custom directories for each, which is odd that the P3 works and the K3 doesn’t.  If it’s any consolation, the K3 utility, Rev 1.15.6.27, doesn’t show it either on a native 32 bit installation, so I don’t think multiarch is at fault here.

Comments

Comment by Nate Bargmann on 2018-11-03 21:59:00 -0500

Moving on to Debian Buster, libgtkhtml is no longer in the package repository. It’s not really a big deal as the help files can be viewed with any Web Browser.