Topspin and 32 bit libraries in a 64 bit system

On and off we have touched upon this topic, either in the context of making Topspin play well with Fedora or RHEL5. In particular, this problem is related to the inability of Topspin not able to source the 64 bit libraries.   This is a small snippet in that list. Hopefully, I will summarize the required libraries and rpm-s in a comprehensive post later.

System :  RHEL 6.3 on a Intel 64 bit machine (Dell Optiplex 390)

After the install, I needed to install the following 32 bit rpm-s that essentially provide X11 related shared object libraries.  Please remember that, in a 64 bit system like the above, the 64 bit versions of these shared libraries are already installed.  Since Topspin takes a minimalist approach, it only looks for files under /usr/lib instead of /usr/lib64, to give an example.

The following 32 bit rpm-s are needed even for TS install to work properly, via the graphical interface. 

glibc.i686             : 
glibc-devel.i686    : 
libX11.i686 (this gets pulled in as a dependency if you install libX11-devel)
libX11-devel.i686  : 

After install, once your flexlm license manager is started

correctly, the TS startup halts at the point where the

welcome screen is supposed to come up.

One or more of the shared library files will be reported

to be missing in the console window, at this stage. The rpm-s shown above are the ones that provide those missing shared object libraries.

The following are needed for the TS gui to start correctly.


libXext-devel.i686 

libXtst.i686

 After the above rpm-s are installed,  the GUI comes up without any issues.