I had a similar problem with broken dependencies when trying to install wine and acroread, and a complaint when trying to install ia32-libs-multiarch, just after upgrading to 12.04 from 11.04 (passing over 11.10). It seems that some ppa's I had in 11.04 installed newer versions of applications in the system. After upgrading, the remains of these apps seemed to do some mess in the dependencies.
The solution that seems to work (until now), was found on a german ubuntu board (http://forum.ubuntuusers.de, posts from user Lasall):
First a downgrade is required and done with the following:
create the 'preferences' file:
sudo vi /etc/apt/preferences
and insert the following lines:
Package: *
Pin: release a=precise*
Pin-Priority: 2012
Pin-Priority must be greater than 1000.
Then you may downgrade the offending applications with:
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Then you may install packages that complained about dependencies, like
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs-multiarch, or sudo apt-get install ia32-libs.
Finally, you should remove the file you just created:
sudo rm /etc/apt/preferences
because else no new updates would be found.
Hope this helps you too!
Sounds like installing through WUBI did not correctly detect the available foreign architectures. As tumbleweed suggested printing the foreign architectures probably returns nothing. Add i386 as a foreign architecture, update the apt cache, then install the 32 bit libs.
sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
Best Answer
The ia32-libs package was a hack to get 32-bit packages installed on a 64-bit installation. Since Ubuntu version 11.10 (Oneiric), Multi Arch has been added. One of the objectives for it is removing the
ia32-libspackage. Instead, you have to install the 32-bit libraries of a package with:You don't have to worry about this for packages in the standard repositories (e.g. the
winepackage). For external software, it's a bit more difficult because you have to find the dependencies manually. In that case, use your favorite search engine to find which libraries you need.It seems that ia32-libs still exist, but merely as a convenience package to include common 32-bit libraries. This package now uses Multi Arch to install the 32-bit packages correctly.