On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 12:05:26AM +0100, Bernd Petrovitsch wrote:
On Tue, 2007-11-06 at 13:35 -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
On Tue, Nov 06, 2007 at 06:58:15PM +0100, Jonas Meurer wrote:
Do you have any reasons for that suggestion? Which disadvantages does
the amd64 port have on system with up to 2GB of RAM?
A few programs still don't compile or work on 64bit systems (not amd64
Any real-world examples?
Even OpenOffice runs as 64bit since months.
The only which I remember rumors are "grub". But being a bootloader,
Grub on Etch amd64 works just fine.
that probably doesn't hurt much.
Fact is that I run pure 64bit Linux since months on my home desktop
(though I'm not the typical desktop user;-).
specific, just 64bit system specific), but other than that generally no
disadvantages.
I guess you could say that the fact the programs are slightly bigger
(since all pointers become 8 bytes rather than 4) is a disadvantage, but
on the other hand a lot of code runs slightly faster with 64bit, with a
Yes, x86_64 has more registers than i386.
few types of programs running much faster. A few very very pointer
heavy programs might run slightly slower, although I don't know of any
where this is the case.
In short: FUD?!
Len Sorensen knows a lot about running amd64. Consider that before you
write off what he says as FUD.
[...]
The main missing programs seem to be things which are closed source, so
adobe flash, acrobat reader, etc. Some of these do have more or less
functional open source replacements. Video codecs can also be a
Some browsers (konqueror, firefox as far as I've been told) allow to run
32bit plugins from the 64bit version. Since the flash-plugin and others
is not really important for me, I don't really care.
Well, you're wrong. In Lenny, there's a wrapper that does this but in
Etch it doesn't exist and can't be backported. So flash in Etch needs
the ia-32 chroot. I don't know if anything else does since I don't use
them.
problems since many are 32bit windows code only. Some people just run
the few problem programs in a 32bit chroot and deal with it that way,
Or install 32bit libs and run a 32bit browser/application on the x86_64
installation.
May or may not work, depending on the code and what all libs it needs.
which seems to make a lot of sense. I suspect pretty soon these
problems will go away, although it may not happen until windows users
finally get with the program and start doing 64bit there.
Yes, but that implies "Vista" there and God knows how compatible (even
to pre-Vista Windoze) the result will be.