Some commercial packages (namely AftershotPro) still depend on the old 32 bits compatibility libs for ubuntu. The package is obsolete for a long time now as the new ubuntu distributions are compatible with 32-bits stuff from the start (at least that’s what I gather from various sources).

For aftershot there were two approaches:

1. Install the aftershot 32 bit deb version with dpkg -i –force-architecture. This approach is now obsolete as the 32-bits version is outdated
2. Manually install ia32-libs from somewhere else and install aftershot 64 bit deb. This step is unnecessary as stated before.
3. Force-install the aftershot 64 bit deb. This leads to complications later on as every time packages are installed the installer tries to fix the supposedly broken dependencies by removing aftershot.

To fix approach 3, I prepared an ia32-libs dummy package with no content. It does nothing, but it makes the apt system believe that you have the package installed, after which aftershot and any other packages that require ia32-libs run just fine.

You can download the package here: ia32-libs_1.0_all.deb

The commands used to prepare the package were:

equivs-control ia32-libs
# edit ia32-libs to give the package name 
# ia32-libs and a sensible description
equivs-build ia32-libs