Hi there,
Over the weekend I added linux to my new refurbished HP a1677c based
on the amd64 unstable stream. I had been running Debian ia32 unstable
distribution for many years,
Yet this is my first venture on the 64bit SMP linux land.
I am very pleased that the amd64 unstable stream is almost perfect.
All sound, video, usb, lan, wireless keyboard and mouse, openoffice and
media applications work correctly under 64bit linux.
The only outstanding major issue is that 32bit only applications like,
acroread/firefox, still tend to look for 64bit gdk/pango stuff by
mistake after installing ia32-libs-gtk_1.0_amd64.deb.
For example the 32 bit applications would be looking for
/etc/gtk-2.0/gdk-pixbuf.loader instead of
/etc/gtk-2.0/gdk-pixbuf.loader.32 and /etc/pango/pango.modules instead
of /etc/pango32/pango.modules. They crashed or rectangles showed up in
place of text inside the menu and the index panels.
The 32bit applications would work if we rename
/etc/gtk-2.0/gdk-pixbuf.loader.32 as /etc/gtk-2.0/gdk-pixbuf.loader and
copy /etc/pango32/pango.modules to /etc/pango/.
(However keeping them that way will break all 64bit applications using
gdk/pango. )
The version of gtk in ia32-libs-gtk is 2.4 while the version of the
regular stuff is 2.10. (I suppose we spend less time in porting to the
emul.) The acroread wrapper is also looking at the wrong place in gtk
version detection. (The wrapper cannot handle a gtk minor version of
getter than 9 anyway, I usually worked around that by hard coding the
version.)
It looks like the 32bit emul structures are somewhat there, but the
32bit applications just do not know how to follow. Are there any
recommended procedures to ensure 32 bit applications would make use of
the 32bit emul structures properly? What else could we do, other than
setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH?
Currently I use iceweasel and other pdf readers instead. If I have to
run acroread, I'll touch up the structure manually before and after.
Therefore it is not a show stopper. However we may hit this issue any
time we run a 32 bit gtk related application without using a full
chroot. It would be like to have it fixed. Hopefully some small
tweaks in the is32-libs-gtk package would make it work.
BTW sun-java6-plugin package is i386 only. I need a 64 bit java plugin
to work with iceweasel (64bit). I've downloaded the 64bit jdk from sun,
I am not sure where the mozilla plugin is. There is one from
classpath/gcjwebplugin but it is of version 1.4. Jre/jdk from sun is
1.6 already. I wonder if there is anything newer out there.
Regards,
P.C.
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