Re: Debian AMD64 - any 32bit compatibility?
On Wednesday 30 August 2006 10:17, A J Stiles wrote:
> On Tuesday 29 August 2006 20:17, Thomas Steffen wrote:
> > BTW: what happened to the many plans of running 32bit binaries without
> > a chroot?
> >
> > In my experience, a chroot environment is a mayor PITA, and it is the
> > one main reason that I would not recommend a 64bit system yet expect
> > for the most enthusiastic early adopters.
>
> Mixed 32 and 64 bit systems are a PITA however you implement them, be it
> through a chroot {the Debian way} or having separate /lib and /lib64
> directories {the R*d H*t way}. And there should be no need to have them
> anyway.
At any event - as I already pointed out - installation of amd64 etch base
system and the X system (and nothing else) installs also 32bit libraries. I
was disappointed, therefore I purged from lib32, which were reinstalled at
the next update/upgrade. Probably I should have avoided to install X because
it is not needed for either mpqc or a molecular mechanics global search that
I have compiled at 64bit. I do not use anything else on this computer.
regards
francesco pietra
>
> The fact is simple: any piece of software which will not compile cleanly on
> a pure 64-bit system IS BROKEN.
>
>
> The vast majority of the "problems" with 64-bit-only systems exist only
> because of closed-source software such as Flash player {a delivery vehicle
> for annoying advertisements}, Adobe Acrobat Reader {a second-rate PDF
> displayer, slower, uglier and more bloated than kPDF or gPDF, which --
> thanks mainly to misleading icons -- people mistakenly assume they need}
> and Skype {a bait-and-switch scam where users are promised free telephone
> calls, which one day will be used to deliver lucrative, unignorable
> advertisements}.
>
>
> The exception to the rule-of-thumb is OpenOffice.org. Although it is Free
> Software, it is riddled with elementary mistakes, starting from the
> assumption that the processor uses a 32-bit word length and a 32-bit
> address space, which have severely impacted upon its portability even to
> other 32-bit architectures.
>
> This fiasco should serve as a strident wake-up call to the Free Software
> Community. Remember, OpenOffice.org began life as the closed-source Star
> Office. The egregious programming errors displayed in its source code were
> tolerated because nobody was checking up on them. How many other
> closed-source products contain fundamental design mistakes that nobody
> knows about because the source is kept secret from the users?
>
>
> To deny access to the source code of a program shows nothing but contempt
> for users, and we should not tolerate this blatant abuse.
>
>
> --
> AJS
> delta echo bravo six four at earthshod dot co dot uk
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