libncurses5:amd64 cannot be installed with libncurses5:i386

[Fabrizio Gennari]

adb (the multi-purpose Android tool) is made available for download by Google.

The available version is 32-bit only. Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit is able to run 32-bit executables, but in the case of adb there's a problem.

adb needs libncurses.so.5, and libncurses5:i386 cannot be installed on 64-bit machines: it clashes with the plain libncurses5, needed by many fundamental applications.

Until libncurses5:i386 and libncurses5:amd64 can be installed in parallel, adb cannot be run. This is a serious impediment for wannabe Android developers with 64-bit machines.

[Fabrizio Gennari (fabrizio-ge)]

$ sudo apt-get install libncurses5:i386
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libncurses5:i386 : Depends: libtinfo5:i386 (= 5.9-1ubuntu5) but it is not going to be installed
                    PreDepends: libtinfo5:i386 but it is not going to be installed
                    Recommends: libgpm2:i386 but it is not going to be installed
 lsb-base : Depends: ncurses-bin but it is not going to be installed
 openssh-client : Depends: libedit2 (>= 2.11-20080614-1) but it is not going to be installed
 procps : Depends: libncurses5 (>= 5.5-5~) but it is not going to be installed
          Depends: initscripts but it is not going to be installed
          Recommends: psmisc but it is not going to be installed
 upstart : Depends: initscripts but it is not going to be installed
           Depends: mountall but it is not going to be installed
           Depends: ifupdown (>= 0.6.10ubuntu5)
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[zaichengqi (vmlinz)]

Cause of this problem is that, libncurses5-dev is set conflict with itself, and the conflict field is still not updated with multi-arch.

[zaichengqi (vmlinz)]

You can now install either libncurses5-dev:amd64 or libncurses5-dev:i386 with

sudo aptitude install libncurses5-dev:i386 libncurses5-dev-
or
sudo aptitude install libncurses5-dev:i386- lilbncurses5-dev