On 14 Jun 2012, Darrell Anderson said: This can alternatively be worked around by making the compiler respond to the 64-bitness state. You could do this by replacing one's g++ and c++ with a suitable shell script, and moving g++ out of the way -- I move /usr/bin/gcc to /usr/bin/.wrapped/gcc and likewise for g++, c++ et al -- or by putting the wrapper in another directory and pointing PATH at it. I use this script, which seems to work: #!/bin/bash # # Default to -m64 unless in 32-bit mode or -m32 is specified. # if [[ "$@" =~ (^| )-m(32|64)( |$) ]]; then exec ${0%/*}/.wrapped/${0##*/} "$@" elif [[ "$(uname -m 2>/dev/null)" =~ 64 ]]; then exec ${0%/*}/.wrapped/${0##*/} -m64 "$@" else exec ${0%/*}/.wrapped/${0##*/} -m32 "$@" fi This has some minor negative performance implications for compilation times though. (Using dash would work if dash supported =~, which it doesn't, so you have to run expr twice, which is much slower than starting bash.) Closer to ideal would be making the compiler capable of switching default depending on utsname value, so it would be automatically responsive to e.g. 'linux32' or 'linux64' with no horrible hacky shell script required. (I have promised someone at work that I'll implement this, and will contribute it upstream after that.) (There are other things you have to do for a reliable biarch configuration, such as putting 32-bit include files in a different place, e.g. /usr/include/32, and pointing the include path for 32-bit builds through that directory. Multiarch, as in recent Debian, is even more... amusing to make work.) I still can't build kdeaccessibility (or, probably, any Trinity packages relying on autoconf and uic together) :( Excellent idea. -- NULL && (void)