Re: Problem Installing libc6 (eglibc) from netboot image
Unfortunately I don't have much choice in supporting these apps: both because users want them and because they work better than their non-evil competition. I wish gnash was better, but in my experience it's a poor substitute. I'm not sure, but I am pretty sure that no PDF reader other than Acrobat even comes close to supporting the full PDF standard (and a nasty mess the standard is: I don't really blame other authors).
Surprisingly, 32-bit flash in a 64-bit wrapper worked great for my users during the time when Adobe had no official 64-bit support. Here's a short write-up of what I did: http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2010/06/msg00849.html
Similarly, I've had no problems running 32-bit Acrobat on a 64-bit system in ~2 years. Do you know of any issues off-hand that I should be concerned about?
I actually don't know why skype is evil. I just googled it, but I'd be interested in hearing why you think skype is evil.
Thanks for your take on multiarch, I will keep an eye on it :-)
-Chris
On Feb 23, 2012, at 5:33 PM, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Chris Hiestand wrote:
>> Bob Proulx wrote:
>>> Out of curiosity, what are you using libc6-i386 for on your amd64
>>> machine?
>>
>> To run 32-bit apps. When I need to build a 32-bit app I just switch to a
>> 32-bit machine or VM. I've had to support several 32-bit apps in the past
>> and present including:
>> skype
>
> You realize that skype is one of those evil applications! A kitten
> dies every time another user signs up for it. :-)
>
>> acrobat reader
>> adobe flash player
>> (and a handful of other more custom apps)
>
> Those used to be very problematic on anything other than 32-bit. They
> seem to be working okay in 64-bit native at the moment. Might change
> at any time. There are many good native PDF readers available. Flash
> is still iffy. Gnash works okay but isn't 100% yet. I still hate
> flash sites due to problems with flash even on its native platform.
>
> I had been using a chroot for those 32-bit applications. But not
> currently needing one for any of those reasons now.
>
>> Usually the "quick and dirty" solution is just enough to get these
>> apps running on an amd64 machine. Fortunately a lot of these apps
>> have moved to 64-bit architecture, so the "quick and dirty" solution
>> is less useful; just when Debian is finally capable of doing things
>> right. However I have a feeling multi-arch will be useful in the
>> future.
>
> I am not looking forward to multiarch. I think it is going to be more
> trouble than it is worth. It sounds simple in concept. But the
> implementation leads to many tradeoffs and compromises. For anyone
> who doesn't want multiarch it is going to introduce problems and
> overhead that they don't need.
>
>> I plan to revisit this when it's time to upgrade to wheezy stable.
>
> Good deal.
>
> Bob
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