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Re: newby trying to go debian



tomek.fizyk@op.pl wrote:

Ok, so here is some clarification;)

When I wrote about an official programs I meant binaries released
by their official vendors.
Eg. Official OpenOffice is the one that you can download form
OpenOffice.org site. There are no 64bit precompiled versions available on
the website, so there is no official 64bit OpenOffice.
However, since this is an Open Source software, everyone can download
it's source and compile it. Thanks to that we have so called unofficial builds
made by the community (eg., among other, the AMD64 version packaged
for Debian by Gudjon -
http://mc2-m038.mc2.chalmers.se/%7Egudjon/debian/amd64/)

OpenOffice is actually in etch now on AMD64. I don't use it much, but it works, and has an official debian package.

There is a familiar situation with Firefox - you cannot find an 64bit compiled
version on the mozilla.org, but there are builds made by the community.
32-bit firefox binaries work fine in debian amd64, which is nice because you can use any of the 32-bit-only plugins with these. I have a 32-bit firefox running on my amd64 systems without a chroot, and flash and mplayer-plugin work perfectly.

However, there is also an official debian package for 64-bit firefox.

I hope my explanation on the officiality of the software in the Linux world
is clear enough;)
I think some confustion may be with defining whether "official" means there is an official binary from the vendor, or an official binary from debian. A lot of people here (myself included) prefer to maintain all software on their system the "debian way". For these people, the existence of an official binary from the vendor is not important - as long as there is a package from debian, that's good enough for me.



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