[CentOS] CentOS6: installing 32bit and 64bit RPMS via the installer?

Thu Jul 14 11:47:18 UTC 2011
James Pearson <james-p at moving-picture.com>

James Pearson wrote:
> Installing 64bit CentOS6 only installs x86_64 and noarch RPMS - however, 
> I have a number of legacy 32bit apps that require a number of 32bit RPMS 
> to be installed.
> 
> Does anyone know how to get the installer to install the 32bit versions 
> of 64bit RPMS? i.e. in the way it does for CentOS5.

After and bit of digging, it appears to be down to a change of a default 
setting in yum with CentOS6

The yum config option multilib_policy is now 'best' in CentOS6 - in 
CentOS5 it is 'all' - which means CentOS6 will only install the x86_64 
version if both a x86_64 and i686 RPM exists in the repo

I guess if I want to revert this back to 'all', I'll need to hack 
anaconda to add 'multilib_policy=all' to the temporary yum config file.

James Pearson