Updated it to use 2.4 yesterday for the new cursor grab stuff, so that's the minimum required version now.
Currently it only works as 32bit because of the pointer arithmetic, which I understand is a bit of a pain on Linux, but can certainly be done. I'm not sure if BUILD_SHARED_LIBS will have any impact on whether you're building 64 or 32 bit. IIRC I had to manually modify the makefile for SFML to add the -m32 flag to get it to build 32bit.