The case for 32-bit Java on 64-bit Ubuntu is no longer officially endorsed as part of Bonsai Framework for Enterprise work.
Where may be useful, is for personal use to significantly reduce memory footprint. This becomes especially important on the cloud/hosting where memory is the main driving cost. For example, originally Confluence on 32-bit required less than 1GB of memory while 64-bit was 2x. Modern Java versions may fix (I've yet to verify) this using compression type scans. In my previous experience, there was a cost to this, but it may have been mitigated now (Nov 2016) through optimization.
I'm looking at this over December 2016 so stay tuned...
If you try and install 32-bit Java on 64-bit Ubuntu you will get an error,
This is because the 32-bit library support is not installed,
For Ubuntu 13 and higher, multiarch has also been removed for direct dependencies,
... Tin to fill this out.... notes,
- sudo apt-get install package-name:i386 - http://askubuntu.com/questions/107230/what-happened-to-the-ia32-libs-package
- Discusses how to manually determine dependencies for package-name:i386 - http://askubuntu.com/questions/359156/how-do-you-run-a-32-bit-program-on-a-64-bit-version-of-ubuntu
- More discussions - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9393670/how-to-run-a-32bit-jvm-on-a-64bit-linux
Reading above, somehow(I forget now), but somehow, I got to this and it works,
sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 libgcc1:i386 gcc-4.6-base:i386 libstdc++5:i386 libstdc++6:i386
For Ubuntu 12 to 12.04, ia32-lib has been removed in favour of multiarch,
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs-multiarch
For Ubuntu 11 and lower,
Now 32-bit Java can be installed,
su - serveradmin # If you are not already serveradmin cd ~ # Switch to the serveradmin home directory tar -xvpf jre-7u7-linux-i586.tar.gz
The result will be an uncompressed jre directory using the same name as the package. In this example the folder name would be, jre-7u7-linux-i586.
If you plan to use multiple versions of Java, we recommend keeping the folder name with the version number information and using symbolic links. If you are only using one version of Java, then simply rename the folder.
For the server example, we will rename the folder,
mv jre-7u7-linux-i586 java