How to run 32-bit programs on a 64-bit system [duplicate]

Recently I upgraded my netbook to Ubuntu 13.04 64-bit from Ubuntu 13.04 beta 2 32-bit.

I want to be able to run 32-bit programs (such as WPS, which is a clone of MS Office 2012) on my PC.

How do I do it? Is there an easy way of doing it via the terminal?

Solution 1:

If you install the 32-bit compatibility libraries, you should be able to run 32 bit programs normally:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

Note: if you use Ubuntu 13.10 or higher, you'll need install these packages instead:

sudo apt-get install lib32z1 lib32ncurses5 lib32bz2-1.0

According to the error message that I got trying to install ia32-libs, the following should work to install the replacement libraries.

sudo apt-get install lib32z1 lib32ncurses5 lib32bz2-1.0

This seems to install correctly, but I am still getting an error when I try to run my 32 bit application:

error while loading shared libraries: libpangox-1.0.so.0: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

So evidently there is another step needed.