On Sat, 2011-06-11 at 17:11 +0530, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote: > until now I have always installed 32 bit. I now want to upgrade from > fedora 12 to 15. My friend has sent me a 64 bit dvd. What are the pros > and cons of moving to 64 bit?
I've been running a pure 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 since the time it's been released. At the time, I saw a marginal increase in ffmpeg encoding videos and an actual slight decrease in mencoder. This might be an issue with w64codecs, but I'm not sure. For most usage, the difference was really small. Performance advantages are tiny, so you probably shouldn't change just for that reason. You can even stick to 32-bit with the PAE kernel if you want to address more RAM or get NX-bit support. The repositories are nearly the same size. I haven't had trouble finding any software I need and I've installed quite a few packages (`dpkg --get-selections | wc -l` reports 1965 packages). I don't have Flash installed, but I did install it on a friend's 64-bit install. They have an experimental version that works fine. If you have proprietary graphics hardware, you still shouldn't be worried if it's mainstream. I have installed both nvidia's drivers as well as ati's fglrx with no trouble. There are minor quirks with both where suspend will work imperfectly on some hardware, though. If you're planning on installing 3rd party proprietary software, you might be in for a bit of trouble, though. Some games I remember trying didn't even release 64-bit versions, though IIRC, you could do something by jumping through hoops and installing the equivalent of ia32-libs for your distribution. Essentially, the long and short of it is that upgrading lost me nothing and gained me precious little. Do it if you feel like it. Regards, -- Roshan George _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
