On Tuesday 09 February 2010 07:25, xe22 wrote: > I'm installing larger disks and figure while I'm at it I'll upgrade > Mandriva also. > Since I use an x64 single processor I can't be sure if I should use 64 > bit Linux. > The 32 works fine, but is it worth going to 64, and would there be a lot of > software hits? I know some would have to be repurchased in the 64 version, > but am curious if I would lose the ability to run the majority of > available stuff. > I'd appreciate opinions on the overall gains/losses of this. > > TIA > Louis
I recently reloaded my laptop with 64-bit (amd64) Debian, which had previously had 32-bit (i386) Debian on it. 32-bit applications from i386 can still be installed on 64-bit but at least on Debian require a force override command line option for the architecture (something like '--force-architecture' I think). So far I've only had to do that for RealPlayer, which I had to install to watch recorded lectures from Berkeley. A few applications I wanted to install (like FlightGear) seem not to be available in 64-bit at the moment because of a few packages that are dependencies haven't been ported to 64-bit yet -- but it's only a couple of packages. The main reason to run 64-bit is if you have > 3GB of RAM. You can run > 3GB of RAM with 32-bit if you use PAE [Physical Address Extension], but PAE still only allows individual applications to use up to 3 GB of RAM. Most applications don't need that much RAM (for now), so this is mostly a non-issue. So IMHO it doesn't really matter one way or the other which you choose; I went over to 64-bit mainly to try it out and see what issues I'd run into -- which are minimal -- only a couple of missing packages, and if I actually cared I could install the missing packages from 32-bit to get around that issue. -- Chris Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Mar 3 - Sahana and 7 Years of MHVLUG Celebration Apr 7 - Nagios May 5 - Android
