But the new breed of users that will never get past the newbee stage
because you don't have to with Ubuntu should probably stick with 32
until they are sure that there are 64 bit editions available for
everything. They don't push their systems that hard, anyhow.
Chris Knadle wrote:
On Tuesday 09 February 2010 07:25, xe22 wrote:
I'm installing larger disks and figure while I'm at it I'll upgrade
Mandriva also.
Since I use an x64 single processor I can't be sure if I should use 64
bit Linux.
The 32 works fine, but is it worth going to 64, and would there be a lot of
software hits? I know some would have to be repurchased in the 64 version,
but am curious if I would lose the ability to run the majority of
available stuff.
I'd appreciate opinions on the overall gains/losses of this.
TIA
Louis
I recently reloaded my laptop with 64-bit (amd64) Debian, which had previously
had 32-bit (i386) Debian on it. 32-bit applications from i386 can still be
installed on 64-bit but at least on Debian require a force override command
line option for the architecture (something like '--force-architecture' I
think). So far I've only had to do that for RealPlayer, which I had to
install to watch recorded lectures from Berkeley. A few applications I
wanted to install (like FlightGear) seem not to be available in 64-bit at the
moment because of a few packages that are dependencies haven't been ported to
64-bit yet -- but it's only a couple of packages.
The main reason to run 64-bit is if you have > 3GB of RAM. You can run > 3GB
of RAM with 32-bit if you use PAE [Physical Address Extension], but PAE still
only allows individual applications to use up to 3 GB of RAM. Most
applications don't need that much RAM (for now), so this is mostly a
non-issue.
So IMHO it doesn't really matter one way or the other which you choose; I went
over to 64-bit mainly to try it out and see what issues I'd run into -- which
are minimal -- only a couple of missing packages, and if I actually cared I
could install the missing packages from 32-bit to get around that issue.
-- Chris
Chris Knadle
[email protected]
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium
Mar 3 - Sahana and 7 Years of MHVLUG Celebration
Apr 7 - Nagios
May 5 - Android
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium
Mar 3 - Sahana and 7 Years of MHVLUG Celebration
Apr 7 - Nagios
May 5 - Android
