On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 2:16 PM, Rich Shepard <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Mar 2011, Fedor Pikus wrote: > > > If you have 2GB of RAM or less, 32-bit install may be a bit easier. > > Fedor, > > My AMD-based server/workstation has 2 cores and 4G RAM; my Intel-based > Use 64-bit install on that, or you will be limited to effectively using 3G of RAM (PAE kernel makes better use of the 4G, but still not as good as 64-bit kernel). > Dell laptop has 4 cores and 2G RAM. At least they're symetrical. :-) > > 4 cores or 2 cores and 2 hyperthreads? Either way, 32-bit is fine here. > > Some applications are 32-bit only: many commercial games and things like > > Acrobat, but there are also Open Source programs which do not build well > > on 64-bit architectures (OSS is somewhat behind enterprise commercial > > software development here, > > I don't do games, but use acroread when xpdf doesn't handle the latest > pdf > version. No enterprise-level applications here I don't think. Well, small > Try Okular too, it's still not as good as Acrobat but has better PDF support than XPDF. > enterprises perhaps. > There is a way to run 32-bit Acroread on 64-bit browser, but again mean installing some 32-bit support libraries and a rather finicky plugin wrapper. Of course, outside of the browser it's not an issue at all (other than the extra size of the libraries). If you need to use NVidia or ATI binary drivers, 64-bit mode brings additional issue: you usually have to install 32-bit libraries, unless you really don't use any GL 32-bit programs. Sometimes the path to the 32-bit library gets dropped from ld config file when driver versions are upgraded. Of course, you don't notice it until you run the game or other 32-bit program, then you get some strange error about not being able to initialize display. > > 64-bit is now often primary supported platform, I'm beginning to see > > 32-bit support dropped from heavy-computing tools). > > Tools I use like GRASS, R, LaTeX, PSTricks are not considered heavy > computing tools. > > As far as I know all of these have 64-bit ports. I don't know how clean the port is, but at least it compiles and passed the tests (so they don't do things like assigning pointers to ints). > Thanks for your insights, > > Rich > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > -- Fedor G Pikus ([email protected]) http://www.pikus.net http://wild-light.com _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
