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Per the LTS Enablement Stack wiki, "to install the newer HWE kernel derived from 15.10 (Wily)" there is a different set of packages to install depending on whether a system is multiarch or not.

How do I tell if my system is multiarch or not?

The wiki is "hinty", saying "you may find you need" to do this.

muru
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Organic Marble
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    Usually means you run a 64bit OS, but also use packages that are 32bit. Run uname -m to check what kind of OS you have. x86_64 - 64bit, and i686 - 32bit. Here's more info on multiarch https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiarchSpec. – mikewhatever Feb 19 '16 at 13:30
  • Thanks! I'm confident that I have 64 bit Trusty installed. It's the part about using 32 bit packages that I need to check on, but don't know how to. – Organic Marble Feb 19 '16 at 13:34
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    There will be nothing bad if you use the command for multiarch. – Pilot6 Feb 19 '16 at 13:34
  • If you don't know whether or not you need 32bit packages, chances you great that you don't. – mikewhatever Feb 19 '16 at 13:37
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    I'm not willing to break my system or install un-needed packages by taking these "chances", hence my question. – Organic Marble Feb 19 '16 at 13:42

1 Answers1

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dpkg supports installing packages for other non-native architectures using a system called multiarch. It was introduced in Ubuntu 11.04, so any later release should have it.

You can use dpkg --print-foreign-architectures command to find the added foreign architectures on multiarch e.g.:

% dpkg --print-foreign-architectures
i386

To find the native architecture, use dpkg --print-architecture e.g.:

% dpkg --print-architecture          
amd64

Alternately, you can also read the file /var/lib/dpkg/arch to get a list of added architectures (first one is native, although you can remove it):

% cat /var/lib/dpkg/arch             
amd64
i386
heemayl
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