using IA32 chroot: Exec format error

[Max <relf@unn.ac.ru>]

Hello!

I'm having troubles using IA32 applications under debian-amd64.

First, I installed ia32-libs with apt-get. I noticed that ia32-libs description/docs do not mention 'chroot' at all but claim that "ia32 Linux applications can be executed on 64-bit systems". So I hoped that I would be able "just run" ia32 binaries as promised. But in reality I got "cannot execute binary file" errors.

Next I tried to get into ia32 enviroment with `chroot /emul/ia32-linux/' command but it didn't work saying that '/bin/bash' is missing. I checked ia32-libs package and indeed it did not provide '/bin/bash'.

I decided to follow FAQ with debootstrap'ing. So I run

debootstrap --arch i386 sid /emul/ia32-linux/ ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian

It did a lot of checking/installing/validating/extracting but finally ended up with the following

chroot: cannot run command `mount': Exec format error
W: Failure trying to run: chroot /emul/ia32-linux mount -t proc proc /proc
umount: /emul/ia32-linux/dev/pts: not found
umount: /emul/ia32-linux/dev/shm: not found
umount: /emul/ia32-linux/proc/bus/usb: not found
umount: /emul/ia32-linux/proc: not mounted

So debootstrap installed a lot of IA32 stuff including '/bin/bash' but that stuff still does not work.
In particular, chroot'ing now reports

# chroot /emul/ia32-linux/
chroot: cannot run command `/bin/bash': Exec format error

The same error appears on attempts to run any other application with 'dchroot'.

At the same time 'file /emul/ia32-linux/bin/bash' reports
/emul/ia32-linux/bin/bash: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.2.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped
which looks OK to me.

So I got stuck. Please advise.

Thanks,
Max