On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 12:46 AM, Bluejay Adametz <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>  How does one activate both to appear so that the library packages for both
>> will be put into the system via the GUI?
>
> You should be able to explicitly install 32-bit versions of libraries
> with something like
>       yum install libblah.i686

"yum" used to automatically install both, if available, by default.
This went away a major release or two ago, for lots of good reasons.
Now you have to ask specifically for the non-default-architecture
package, or install a package that has it as a dependency.

This is heavily dependent on the packages not overlapping, and on
being built by our favorite upstream vendor and propagaed to
Scientific Linux. Not all software can be gracefully installed this
way. glibc, for example, has "glibc.x86_64" and "glibc.i686" in the
x86_64 repository for just such  compatibility. "httpd", however, only
has a 64-bit version.

You can also do "yum list | sort" to get a list of packages available
in multiple architectures,

> I'm not sure if there's a way to install both bits with one installation.
>
>                  - Bluejay Adametz, CFII, A&P, AA-5B N45210
>
> We are all stalks sprung from what we bury in ourselves. - A.J.Axline

If you have software that requires both, you can write an RPM that
lists both dependencies. Some software does just that, especially for
cross-platform compilation toolkits.