On Lu, 05 iul 10, 15:40:04, Jim McCloskey wrote: > > 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). Skype is another annoyance with similar workarounds... > 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. One of the workarounds[1] seems to work fine for my brother's laptop. I'm trying to get along without flash, at least until there is a native 68bit version ;) [1] http://wiki.debian.org/FlashPlayer#DebianTesting.27Squeeze.27amd64 Besides the GPU problems mentioned by Ron, don't forget the performance penalty of PAE, which is necessary to take advantage of your 6 GiB RAM. IMVHO PAE is a hack and I would avoid it, at least by using a 64bit kernel. If you plan to switch "later" to amd64 also consider this will require a complete reinstall. Regards, Andrei -- Offtopic discussions among Debian users and developers: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/d-community-offtopic
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