On Sunday 18 November 2007 19:25:06 Derek Smithies wrote: > On Sun, 18 Nov 2007, Philip Charles wrote: > > The big advantage of 64 bit is that it can address lots and lots of > > memory. 32 bit has something like a 4Gb limit. > > Well yes, but you are missing the real problem. > The big big big problem with 64bit is application support. > > a)ATI and Nvidia card support is more problematic.
I've been running ubuntu 64bit for 3 years - with 64bit binary nvidia drivers working happily -- not sure about ATI. > b)Many of the apps on sourceforge etc are tested on 32 bit machines. > when building on 64 bit machines, the library paths etc are wrong. It > don't work. Which is often an autotool issue. (There is a rant coming > on the woes/deficiencies of autotools, but I will suppress that). > c)the latest linux flash plugin is available for 32 bit machines only. Ubuntu have done a nice job of packaging adobe's flashplayer in gusty. I can apt-get and it installs a 32 bit flash player that works flawlessly in both opera and firefox. There are some things that catch us out, but ubuntu volunteers work around them, and consistently package the solution up for the next edition.
