Please Help! i386 libraries refuse to install.

[blues_hawk]

My main system was working fine with the steam client but I found it had weirdly gone missing this week, leaving all games and even the desktop icon in place, and now it refuses install. Everything was working fine a few weeks ago. I tried installing the deb from the website and
Steam-launcher ran and updated, but now says it needs to install these libraries:

https://imgur.com/txpX0IUl.png

Despite all efforts the system can't find them, and when I tried to do it manually using packages from pkgs.org by following the dreaded dependency train, some of the underlying dependencies threatened to break my system by removing a bunch of stuff, including bizarre stuff like conky, apt etc.)

Software manager shows steam along with reviews but shows it not available. What gives?

https://imgur.com/7fypgjJl.png

CPU~Quad core AMD Ryzen 5 2400G with Radeon Vega Graphics (-MT-MCP-) speed/max~1419/3600 MHz Kernel~4.18.0-13-generic x86_64 Up~1 day Mem~2600.5/5971.7MB HDD~4490.9GB(13.4% used) Procs~294 Client~Shell inxi~2.3.56

#14~18.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Thu Dec 6 14:09:52 UTC 2018 (Peppermint 9)

I'm also using Oibaf ppa drivers, which worked nice until this happened.

I have tried reading though every resource I can find, most of which are absurdly old, out of date, extremely irrelevant or even dangerous and can find no information related to my problem. I did find a suggestion to enable :i386 and update repos but that's on by default in this end of the decade and seems to be working.

-/-Anybody know a way out of this mess?-/- --should have been:
---Has anyone seen this recently?---

[x_wing]

Did you run this?:

dpkg --add-architecture i386

[blues_hawk]

Yes. i386 architecture is already enabled in 18.04 but I did it anyway just to be sure.

[x_wing]

Originally posted by blues_hawk:

Yes. i386 architecture is already enabled in 18.04 but I did it anyway just to be sure.

If that's the case, try to update+upgrade your apt deps and they retry steam install.

[blues_hawk]

The system is up to date and all the standard repos are enabled, is there anything extra I should do other than update and upgrade? I also did dist upgrade, which also reports no changes as I did it a few hours ago in hope of some file versions being out of sync in the ppa.
I'll compare the system to the working notebook in the morning. Thanks for helping!

[Zyro]

It doesn't show me any of the linked images; could you paste the text instead?

[blues_hawk]

The Steam installer's choice of xterm makes that difficult, but trying to install steam using apt in a terminal results in this:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
steam:i386 : Depends: libc6:i386 (>= 2.15) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libstdc++6:i386 (>= 4.3) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libx11-6:i386 but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libudev1:i386 but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libxinerama1:i386 but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 (>= 17.3) but it is not going to be installed or
libtxc-dxtn0:i386 but it is not installable
Depends: libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libgpg-error0:i386 but it is not going to be installed
Recommends: libxss1:i386 but it is not going to be installed
Recommends: nvidia-driver-libs-i386:i386 but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.


Also, one of those recommends(nvidia) could breaks things in horrible ways.

[blues_hawk]

Maybe this one will work. https://i.imgur.com/YiL1iUJ.png


It works but in a new window at imgur. At least it's not getting red flagged now.

[petri.piira]

It says "you have held broken packages".

This can happen if you have used a ppa, which replaced something from the base operating system with a "newer" version. and now apt can not find a way to e.g. install your steam dependencies because they clash with something originally installed from a ppa.

You can see the "held packages" by this:
apt-mark showhold
or this:
dpkg -l | grep "^hi"

synaptic can be used to browse your packages and find out which came from where.
Also apt-cache policy command can be used to find out where the package came from.

it might have come from a ppa which was disabled when you upgraded to 18.04, and now you have something from 16.04 stuck. You might need to re-enable your old ppa:s to be able to get rid of the junk.

You need to get rid of all "held" packages (or they could be packages from a ppa, which appear, based on version number, to be more recent than what is available, but actually not more recent, and they cannot be removed or upgraded because something appears to depend on them.

Having ppa:s cause problems is apparently so common that there is a script to clean things up, ppa-purge. And it is a good thing, as trying to manually solve the mess is very difficult.

https://itsfoss.com/how-to-remove-or-delete-ppas-quick-tip/

Here is some useful comments for it:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/32835/whats-the-name-of-ppa-for-ppa-purge

[blues_hawk]

Thanks for helping. This is a fresh install of 18.04 LTS so unfortunately it's not an upgrade error.
In this case, apt only reports held packages for the files that failed dependency checks in the same statement. Everything else works and held is cleared when apt closes.
Those commands show blank, nothing to see there.

Maybe I'll remove the hellokitty ppa and see if that helps. You know... because all third party ppas are evil so therefore the Hello kitty one must be the most evil repo ever. Nevermind that Steam installs its own ppa without asking. :-P

Seriously though, I agree that something in my package manager is borked and it won't hurt to temporarily move apt.sources.d to see if the cause is in one of the 3rd party listings.

[edit] ..Nope, not a 3rd party ppa.

[petri.piira]

I had a similar problem after upgrading my home system to 18.04, and it was caused by a couple of ppa:s, wine (the main ppa for it) and an experimental kernel ppa (which I had installed at some point in late 2015, I guess, before upgrading to 16.04, to get support for my chipset for ubuntu 15.10, or something like that - and then forgotten all about it)

Anyway, in my case, ppa-purge for every single thing which came from ppa:s, not from the native ubuntu repositories, helped.

In any case, a clean 18.04 is good to go. I do not know anything about "peppermint 9" ... wait ... googling ... oh, it is a "cloud centric lubuntu derivative".

In my experience, one wants to be very close to the main distro of a linux flavor, depending on the purpose of the machine in question. To avoid the hassle.

In the RHEL clone world, that would mean CentOS, it is the closest, unless one wants to pay for access to the RHEL channels to get the real thing. CentOS also have nice cloud and docker images, if you need to run something in an RHEL flavor.

In the Canonical world, either the official cloud image for cloud things, or xubuntu for a desktop - assuming one cannot stand the unity (16.04), gnome 3 (18.04) or KDE versions, which would be best for compatibility (but unfortunately I can't stand those, I want a "traditional" desktop, so Xubuntu for me for now).

[blues_hawk]

Yeah I hear ya. I used Xubuntu for years before getting a bit tired of some of the repeated battles I had on that distro. I happened to be looking for something lightweight to resurrect an old netbook I had laying around and liked it so much I started using it for everything. Peppermint 9 is basically an lxde/xfce combo using ubuntu 18.04 lts. It had the features I wanted(panel weather that works etc.) and coupled with this new monster it doesn't wait for much - I just have new and exciting battles now...mostly the same ones I wold have had with the new hardware and old faithful xubuntu. ...at least you didn't say Arch like both my kids do...right before rolling release eats their homework again. :P
I credit AMD for the majority of them at the moment, including 3 weeks of windows nightmares after finding out my long lived win7 game setup wouldn't work with the new toys.(finally just dumped cod/uo into a fresh win10 and used cmos to switch between) I eventually got dual boot working with win10(ptui) and p9 but then this happened. I could just ignore it and go install the games in win10 but... well... :ponder: It's a challenge. :)
p9 was working fine with steam up until a few weeks ago when this happened--likely due to something totally unrelated I tried(lots of astrophotography toys and development).
It's still working fine on my wife's acer as well as my notebook. I hate to tear up everything to find this but since I have a good working backup I just reloaded(problem slipped by me into backup) I guess that's a plan.
Purge doesn't always get everything and the switch of above gpu ppa's went sideways pretty quick. I know where I went wrong and will try again after a restore.

One reason I keep after these things is in case somebody else has the issue and appreciate everyone's input.
:tired:

[blues_hawk]

After deciding it wasn't worth half the hours I had invested, I finally solved this while working on something totally unrelated...as it goes sometimes. Thanks for the help everybody.

One thing I found recently that may have helped is to enable backports, which are obfuscated a bit in Software, but give updated versions of software and drivers to long term support distros.(i.e. 18.04LTS)

I still got failed :i386 but it was because it couldn't overwrite one that was installed.

So... as I just learned, to install the failed dependencies instead of running

 sudo apt-get install -f 

to fix the broken/held dependency error
I instead ran this:

sudo apt-get -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-overwrite" -f install 

and then I got the rest of the i386 deps and
***IT'S ALIVE!*** :D

Hope this helps others who run into the issue.

[THElib03]

For anyone still searching for answers I had the same problem with Ubuntu 23.10 and managed to get it working and I hope this helps because I managed to ♥♥♥♥ up my Ubuntu in the process.

First, the different packages necessary for steam are now in different repositories (I don't know if its a provisional thing like a beta channel, so maybe check yourself the Ubuntu listings in the future or for whatever Ubuntu version you are using: https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=mantic&section=all&arch=any&keywords=steam&searchon=names) you can enable them with:

 sudo add-apt-repository universe multiverse 

Next, thanks to x_wing, make sure to activate the 32 architectures with:

 sudo dpkg  --add-architecture i386 

This doesn't seem to do anything at first but thanks again to x_wing:

 sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade 

showed me that it was fetching the 32bit repositories.
So now everything should be in place to install all the packages for steam:

 sudo apt install steam-installer 

[deaddoof]

Originally posted by THEliberator 03:

For anyone still searching for answers I had the same problem with Ubuntu 23.10 and managed to get it working and I hope this helps because I managed to ♥♥♥♥ up my Ubuntu in the process.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/18/wine_90_is_out/

Wine will have 32 bit on 64 bit like Windows.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winprog64/wow64-implementation-details

Hopefully, we will not need to install i386 in the future.

[D. Flame]

Do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior Flatpak?

Seriously, just install the flatpak version of Steam.