Yes it's supposed to run on everything but it doesn't, we don't live in an ideal world, going on supporting many architectures has a cost especially for Java itself, it's a matter of time. By the way, your laptops are already unable to run the latest version of Blender because it requires SSE2. I don't tell you to throw away some hardware that still works but you'll have to accept that some things will stop working. What will you do when some dependencies won't work with 32-bit architectures? You'll have to stick with obsolete versions. I don't want to encourage planned obsolescence, Sven will probably do its best to update the build instructions if needed but at some point, you might be almost alone with your problems. Computer science is a matter of compromises, maybe we'll have to choose between supporting very old hardware and using some recent APIs when it's not possible to do both at the same time.
Please can you be very accurate about which kind of cross-compilation you want? The -m32 flag allows to compile 32-bit programs on 64-bit platforms but you need the external dependencies as 32-bit libraries too. Sven probably knows such aspects better than me.
Locked
