How to disable multiarch support?

Question

I don't want to install any i386 package. Is there any way to disable functionality?

Answer 1

12.10 and later

dpkg --remove-architecture i386

to get rid of multiarch on an amd64 installation. in case you will have message, like:

dpkg: error: cannot remove architecture 'i386' currently in use by the database

you should remove all i386 packages before:

dpkg -l | grep i386

Answer 2

11.10 & 12.04

Multiarch support is enabled by the file /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/multiarch

If you rename this file and run an update in a terminal you will notice that the i386 repo's are no longer visible.

Thus

sudo mv /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/multiarch /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/multiarch.backup

Answer 3

First of all, remove all i386-packages like so:

sudo apt-get remove --purge `dpkg --get-selections | grep i386 | awk '{print $1}'`

Please note: Skype, Steam, teamviewer etc. might be purged as well.

Then proceed with fossfreedoms advices.

Answer 4

Based on both Ben's answer and user41220's answer I did the following:

sudo apt-get remove --purge `dpkg --get-selections | grep i386 | awk '{print $1}'`

Then

sudo dpkg --remove-architecture i386

and that worked just fine for me.