Beyond Compare 3 for 64-bit ubuntu linux

Last week, I switched my xubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) box to Linux Mint 8 (Helena), to see how things had evolved in the past 18 months. Unfortunately, I also decided to switch from 32- to 64-bit, and of course not everything works the way it used to.

Luckily, the good folks at Scooter Software pointed me to this hack to allow their 32-bit Linux flavour of Beyond Compare 3 to find the 32-bit libraries it needs to run.

So, here's an updated version of that hack for ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala or Linux Mint 8 Helena:

1. Download the i386 libqt3-mt .deb package into /tmp
2. Download the latest Beyond Compare 3 .deb package into /tmp
3. $ sudo su

4. apt-get install ia32-libs
   cd /tmp; dpkg-deb --extract /tmp/libqt3-mt*.deb libqt3-mt
   cp -R libqt3-mt/usr/lib/* /usr/lib32; rm -fr /tmp/libqt3-mt
   dpkg -i --force-architecture /tmp/BCompareLinux*.deb