Install python 32 bit on 64 bit linux

Question

I basically have two questions:

1. How do you install 32bit python alongside 64bit python on linux?
2. How do I fix my broken system from the failed attempt below?

I just tried to install 32bit python alongside my 64bit python on linux mint 16. It's not as straight forward as I hoped for (something like sudo apt-get install python32 would be nice) but after a bit of googling I downloaded python 2.7.6 and did the following:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs gcc-multilib checkinstall
CC="gcc -m32" LDFLAGS="-L/lib32 -L/usr/lib32 -Lpwd/lib32 -Wl,-rpath,/lib32 -Wl,-rpath,/usr/lib32" ./configure --prefix=/opt/pym32
make
sudo checkinstall

The should supposedly make me able to run 32bit og 64bit (default) like this:

python -c 'import sys; print sys.maxint'
/opt/pym32/bin/python -c 'import sys; print sys.maxint'

... but /opt/pym32/ wasn't even created. Worse, my system now reports 29 broken dependencies, indicating that the new python replaced the old one or something like that. To fix it, aptitude suggests that I remove a whole bunch of packages that I need and install a whole bunch of packages that I don't need.

I used checkinstall rather than make install to be able to reverse/uninstall if something went wrong, but uninstalling/reinstalling python won't work because of the broken dependencies. Is there a way to get out of this mess?

Answer 1

I think you should use a virtual environment and install a different python version in it. Check this answer for better understanding --> Is it possible to install another version of Python to Virtualenv?