William Tetrault posted <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, excerpted below, on Tue, 25 Jan 2005 17:43:23 -0600:
> On Tuesday 25 January 2005 01:00 pm, Christian Bock wrote: >> I'm not happy with plain 64 Bit linux, because of things like w32codecs, >> wine and flash.... You can also encourage me to stay on 64 bit, but you >> gotta have good arguments. > > The good arguments consist of mentioning that the 64-bit AMD cpus have > extra registers that only get used in the presence of a 64-bit operating > system. Another one is that Gentoo is headed toward the multi-lib standard. Small steps toward that end were taken last summer. 2005.0 has some substantial steps in that direction (portage had to catch up too, 2005.0 no longer supports -multilib, but not everything is there for the full system, yet), the goal is to have everything working by 2005.1 (to be released in July or Aug). When multilib is fully in place, /lib, /usr/lib, etc, will all be their 32-bit default. All the 64-bit stuff will be in the lib64 variants. With the just coming 2005.0, the pieces are pretty much in place, but some ebuilds are't fixed yet. Thus, the standard 2005.0 profile will use lib32 and lib64, with lib being a symlink to lib64, for those ebuilds that still assume lib is the native system bitness libraries. For those that want to "break their system", there's an experimental subprofile, nosymlinks, inside the 2005.0 profile, that goes the rest of the way. However, with even ebuilds as critical as portage still installing 64-bit libs to lib instead of using the profile settings, that subprofile /will/ break your system, still. With multilib fully in place, most or all libraries will be compiled twice, once for native 64-bit (placed in lib64), once for legacy 32-bit (in lib32 for now, lib for 2005.1). Plugins and the like are normally instituted as 32-bit libraries, so they'll work normally, with any applications also compiled as 32-bit. The multi-lib standard does /not/, however, apply to 32-bit applications, only libraries. There's still going to be some differences between distributions on how applications are handled. By 2005.1, I expect there to be a Gentoo HOWTO on installing 32-bit and 64-bit applications in parallel. With a full multi-lib system, 32-bit and 64-bit libraries should exist in parallel without issue (save for the occasional bug). However, that won't be the case for 32-bit applications. You'll then have to choose whether you want 64-bit mplayer, say, or 32-bit mplayer, unless you tweak things to be able to install both in different dirs. However, by mid-year, 64-bit MSWormOS should be becoming more popular, so 64-bit codecs, plugins, and the like, should also be becoming more available, and the problems with running 32-bit only binary codecs and the like in 64-bit mode will be disappearing, because they won't be 32-bit only any more. Of course, that still leaves the issue of them being proprietary-only, unfortunately... -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin -- gentoo-amd64@gentoo.org mailing list
