I just discussed the issue with a former SuSE developer... and we finally agreed that the perl-32bit package is just plain broken/incomplete¹. — In other words, it's not your fault! :)

As a workaround, you can proceed as follows:

Get hold of the following two RPMs (e.g. from the SuSE 10.3 installation media in the i586 subdirectory), and copy them into some temporary directory:

perl-base-5.8.8-75.i586.rpm
perl-5.8.8-75.i586.rpm
[download]

Extract the 32-bit perl binary and the i586-linux-thread-multi subtrees from those packages

temp/ $ rpm2cpio perl-base-5.8.8-75.i586.rpm | cpio -idmv '*i586-linux
+*' './usr/bin/perl'
temp/ $ rpm2cpio perl-5.8.8-75.i586.rpm      | cpio -idmv '*i586-linux
+*'
[download]

Rename the binary, e.g. to "perl32"

temp/ $ mv usr/bin/perl usr/bin/perl32
[download]

In the temp dir, you should find a directory ./usr, which you then just copy over into the existing (64-bit) perl installation, i.e. (as root):

temp/ $ cp -af usr/  /
[download]

(don't worry... the 64-bit version will work as before)

___

¹ The perl-32bit package is missing

• the shared object file subset from the (i586) perl-base package
• all non-.so files, i.e. the associated .pm files, etc. (which are being searched in the i586-linux-thread-multi subdirectories by the 32-bit perl)
• the perl binary itself

(bug report submitted, so hopefully the issue will be fixed in the next SuSE release)

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