Getting LocalSend working on a 32-bit-only x86 laptop.

LocalSend has never shipped a 32-bit Linux build: verified across all 27 GitHub releases (1.3.1 → 1.18.2) the artifacts are linux-x86-64 and linux-arm-64 only, and Flutter's Linux embedder targets x64/arm64/riscv64 — so the official app cannot be built for i386 either. This repo cross-compiles a third-party CLI that speaks the same protocol (v2/v3) for linux/386, verifies it against a stdlib-only protocol client, and ships the binary with its hash.

• localsend-386/ — cross-compile, install and verify the 32-bit LocalSend CLI. Includes desktop/ for real menu entries (LocalSend, LocalSend (receive), and a danger-gated auto-accept launcher) with icons, a helper to pin a stable device name, and patches/ showing exactly what this build changes against upstream. Releases carry the built binary and its sha256.
• docs/LOCALSEND-DISCOVERY.md — why LocalSend discovery fails on Linux, and the two layers that do it: a kill-switch VPN routing the discovery multicast into the tunnel, and ufw's default-deny policy dropping it inbound.
• docs/issue-silent-receive-failures.md — the full debugging session behind issue #1, including the eight traps that hid the cause.

sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS                       # from the release
sudo install -m0755 localsend-cli-386 /usr/local/bin/localsend-cli
localsend-cli --version                       # localsend-cli v1.3.2-local.4 (linux/386)
localsend-cli --help                          # every command, env var and worked example

Receiving? Run it where it can prompt you, or install the menu entries from localsend-386/desktop/. It prints the name peers see for this machine, which is the thing you otherwise have to walk to another device to discover:

INFO [IdeaPad] LocalSend receive mode
INFO   device name : IdeaPad
INFO   fingerprint : 0786dcbd203aef22…
INFO   port        : 53317

• LocalSend — https://github.com/localsend/localsend (Apache-2.0), https://localsend.org. The app this repo works around. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the project.
• localsend-cli — https://github.com/tingkai-c/localsend-cli (MIT), a fork of https://github.com/meowrain/localsend-go. This is the code that gets cross-compiled here.
• LocalSend protocol — https://github.com/localsend/protocol.

As of September 2026, no: no LocalSend build for linux-i386 in any release, no 32-bit Linux Python from python-build-standalone (i686 exists only for Windows), and no 32-bit Linux Node.js since v9.11.2 (2018).

• Go 1.22+ if you build it yourself — or just take a released binary, which needs nothing on the target machine.
• A 64-bit machine to build from. Cross-compiling is the whole point; do not compile on the target.

https://github.com/StellarStoic/netbook-32bit-toolkit — the Kali i386 upgrade automation and the Hermes-on-i686 feasibility analysis built for the same machine (a Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2, Intel Atom N280, 2 GB RAM, 32-bit only). Worth a look if you are keeping an ageing 32-bit box alive; nothing in this repo depends on it.

MIT for the scripts in this repository (see LICENSE). Upstream projects keep their own licenses; nothing from them is vendored here.