advice on amd64
I recently acquired a new Dell Studio 15 laptop and mean to install
Debian (squeeze) on it. I'm trying to decide whether to do a 64-bit
install (amd64) or a 32-bit install (i386). My understanding is that
the amd64 port is now very complete, and that the principal difficulty
would probably be with flashplayer (since Adobe withdrew the 64-bit
version of flashplayer 10 for linux).
There seem to be various workarounds for this issue, but I was
wondering if the performance gain that one might expect from the
64-bit architecture over the 32-bit architecture would be worth the
extra trouble entailed by these workarounds. The machine has a 1.6GHz
Intel Quad Core processor and 6GB of RAM. The GPU is an ATI Mobility
Radeon (HD 5470) with 1GB of onboard memory.
The laptop will be a work machine, but it will not be required to do
3D modelling or any intensive mathematical tasks (except maybe some
statistical analysis and visualization with R, along with some audio
analysis).
If anyone here had advice to offer regarding this choice, I would very
much appreciate hearing it,
Thank you,
Jim
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