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.
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.
cheers,
Derek.
I went from 32 to 64 bit on this machine and found that I had lost apps
like dosemu, so after a few months I moved back to 32 bit. I did not
notice any change in speed.
On 11/18/07, Ross Drummond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:13, Phill Coxon wrote:
In other words - is there any point in my doing an apt-on-cd backup
of all the updates I've installed to Ubuntu 7.10, or will every
package have to be downloaded again as a 64bit version anyway?
Thanks.
This is not an exact answer to your question.
I recently set up a 64bit computer with Gentoo. Gentoo is source
based distribution which downloads the source code and compiles the
applications on
the computer they are going to be used. This allows applications to
customised and optimised according to your wishes.
I compiled my applications to run on 64 bit architecture setting one
of the compiler flags to;
-march=x86-64
Not one of the GPL applications failed to compile. Some third party
applications which supply the executable rather than the source code
require 32bit emulation to run.
Down at the silicon level computing is about manipulating numbers. So
anything
which allows these numbers to be processed in 64 as opposed to 32 bit
chunks has to be a good thing.
My advice is go 64 bit as much as possible.
Cheers Ross Drummond
Yum info nspluginwrapper
Adobe flashplayer works in 64 bit Fedora with the wrapper
There's a wrapper for JRE too
