Troy Dawson wrote:
It depends on the application.
There are alot of 32 bit libraries in the x86_64 distro. So alot of 32
bit applications work just fine.
Probrubly the most used example is the flash plugin for your browser. If
you install the 32 bit firefox, the 32 bit flash plugin works just fine.
But I'm sure there are some 32 bit programs that are going to have
problems.
*Troy puts on his mind reading hat*
How do I install 32 bit libraries and applications?
You put .i386 at the end.
An example is installing the 32 bit version of firefox.
yum install firefox.i386
Since I still have my mind reading hat on, I see that you are
complaining that the firefox.i386 isn't installing because it conflicts
with firefox.x86_64.
That is usually the difference between applications and libraries.
The 64 bit libraries usually reside in some directory called /lib64/,
like /usr/lib64/. Because of this, you can have both the 32 bit
libraries (that reside in a /lib/ directory such as /usr/lib/) and the
64 bit libraries on your machine at the same time
But applications are different. When you start firefox, what do you
type? You type "firefox". You don't type firefox.i386 or
firefox.x86_64. So, there is a conflict with most application, you can
only have 32 bit or 64 bit installed, but not both. If you install both
of them, then it usually is the last one win's, so there isn't really a
point in having them both installed.
So, my example above really should have been
rpm -e firefox
yum install firefox.i386
yum --enablerepo=macromedia install flash-plugin
But I figured I'd actually answer that third question before it was asked.
OK, I asked from the single application installation perspective, 32-bit one if the 64-bit
version is not available.
Since you mentioned firefox, is there an 64-bit adobe flash plug-in available for firefox
x86_64? What happens with the current 32-bit extensions for firefox and thunderbird
regarding firefox x86_64?
