To develop binaries for the other architecture on a biarch architecture, the respective libraries for the second architecture must additionally be installed. These packages are called rpmname-32bit. You also need the respective headers and libraries from the rpmname-devel packages and the development libraries for the second architecture from rpmname-devel-32bit.
Most open source programs use an autoconf-based program configuration. To use autoconf for configuring a program for the second architecture, overwrite the normal compiler and linker settings of autoconf by running the configure script with additional environment variables.
The following example refers to an x86_64 system with x86 as the second architecture.
Use the 32-bit compiler:
CC="gcc -m32"
Instruct the linker to process 32-bit objects (always use gcc as the linker front-end):
LD="gcc -m32"
Set the assembler to generate 32-bit objects:
AS="gcc -c -m32"
Determine that the libraries for libtool and so on come from /usr/lib:
LDFLAGS="-L/usr/lib"
Determine that the libraries are stored in the lib subdirectory:
--libdir=/usr/lib
Determine that the 32-bit X libraries are used:
--x-libraries=/usr/lib/xorg
Not all of these variables are needed for every program. Adapt them to the respective program.
CC="gcc -m32" \
LDFLAGS="-L/usr/lib;" \
.configure \
--prefix=/usr \
--libdir=/usr/lib
make
make install