You have most probably 4 GB RAM and you want to use them all 🙂 The only choice for you is to install Ubuntu 64 bits. But, a lot of software goodies out there are still compiled on 32 bits. Of course, they won’t start on your brand new 64 bits operating system that can do everything (well, a little bit exaggerated) 🙂 Here is how to install the 32 bits libs on your Ubuntu 64 bits: #sudo apt-get -V install ia32-libs Reading package lists… Done Building dependency tree Reading state information… Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: linux-headers-2.6.31-14 (2.6.31-14.48) linux-headers-2.6.31-14-generic (2.6.31-14.48) Use ‘apt-get autoremove’ to remove them. The following extra packages will be installed: lib32asound2 (1.0.20-3ubuntu6.1) lib32bz2-1.0 (1.0.5-3) lib32gcc1 (4.4.1-4ubuntu9) lib32ncurses5 (5.7+20090803-2ubuntu2) lib32stdc++6 (4.4.1-4ubuntu9) lib32v4l-0 (0.6.0-1) lib32z1 (1.2.3.3.dfsg-13ubuntu3) libc6-i386 (2.10.1-0ubuntu16) Suggested packages: lib32asound2-plugins () The following NEW packages will be installed: ia32-libs (2.7ubuntu17) lib32asound2 (1.0.20-3ubuntu6.1) lib32bz2-1.0 (1.0.5-3) lib32gcc1 (4.4.1-4ubuntu9) lib32ncurses5 (5.7+20090803-2ubuntu2) lib32stdc++6 (4.4.1-4ubuntu9) lib32v4l-0 (0.6.0-1) lib32z1 (1.2.3.3.dfsg-13ubuntu3) libc6-i386 (2.10.1-0ubuntu16) 0 upgraded, 9 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 34.0MB of archives. After this operation, 144MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue…