Ubuntu – Troublesome Paraview installation with 12.04 LTS (and not with 14.04 LTS)

12.0414.04aptsoftware installation

As I try and install Paraview on a desktop running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with

sudo apt-get install paraview

I receive a lengthy warning, whose most worrisome part is

The following packages will be REMOVED:google-earth-stable ia32-libs ia32-libs-multiarch:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libglapi-mesa:i386 libglu1-mesa:i386 libhdf5-serial-1.8.4 libqt4-opengl:i386 libvisual-0.4-plugins:i386 nvidia-331-updates skype skype-bin:i386 xorg xserver-xorg

which seems to me rather excessive and greedy since it's aiming to remove some other important and unrelated packages such as Google Earth or Skype. Obviously I don't continue.

The interesting piece of information is that the same apt-get command runs smoothly and without such auto-immune demands on another machine operated by Ubuntu 14.04 LTS where, for example, both Google Earth and Skype are installed too.

I have reasons (left) to have Ubuntu 12.04 LTS running on the first computer. The question is then: is anybody aware of the causes of this auto-immune behaviour of Paraview? What could be fixes and workarounds?

NB I could not create a 'Paraview' tag owing to my young forum age, but a senior member may find it useful to do so.

Best Answer

You have a 64bit Ubuntu installation, so by default it will try to install amd64 architecture packages it will look for paraview:amd64 which does depend on libgl1-mesa-glx:amd64. See http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/paraview

On other hand, you already have google-earth-stable & skype on i386 architecture of same libraries.

AFAIK, The easiest solution is to install i386 version of paraview 

sudo apt-get install paraview:i386
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