I don't mean to start a distro flamewar, but I've been running Gentoo amd64 for about 5 months and haven't had many issues. Flash works fine, mplayer works, ect. Gentoo does it by providing emul-x86 packages so you run 64-bit as much as you can, and you run whatever you can't using the x86 emulation libraries. I think it just compiles both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of all the important libraries. The one issue I have had is with a pretty obscure library- libphysics, I think. Portage compiles it 64-bit, but a game I want to run needs a 32-bit version of it, and I haven't been able to get a 32-bit version of it installed and working. I'm sure there's a way, but it hasn't been worth that much of my time yet.
Anyway, if you really want to run 64-bit, you might try Gentoo. Perhaps other distributions get it right as well. ~John On 2/9/07, Rob Sherwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 11:02:43AM -0500, Nick Cummings wrote: > I just recently got a new computer and installed Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10) on > it. Since the processor is an Athlon 64 X2, I installed the amd64 (or > x86_64, if you prefer) version of Ubuntu. Having gotten the basic system > up, I wanted to get some 3rd party commercial programs (Skype, flash, > etc.) and some media codec, but I'm having some problems. It looks like > many of these packages only exist as 32-bit binaries (usually i386) and I > gather that it isn't trivial to use these in Ubuntu. It never occured to > me that there would be a problem with using i386 packages on an amd64 > system, since the processor is still using x86 instructions. > > The way I understand it, you have to manually figure out what 32-bit > libraries are required by each package, download them, install them in an > alternate location (so they don't overwrite the 64-bit libraries in /lib), > and maybe do some nonesense with chroot (which I'm not familiar with). I > gather that it's this way with any debian distro. This all sounds like a > whole lot of hassle that I don't need. Nick, I hate to be all doom and gloom, but I previously tried to go down the same route, and eventually gave up and installed the vanilla x86 (non _64) version. After much pain and suffering, I finally found the compile options to get mplayer working. I was never able to get wine to work just right, and despite many "it all works" flash packages for 32 bit compatibility, I was never able to get it to work. It was a lot of cost, and little benefit (I'm not running any apps on my home comp that really benefit from being 64 bit), so I just gave up. My understanding is that 64 bit windows has the same problem. My hope is that in the future there will be better 64 bit binary support, but until that time, it just wasn't worth the hassle for me. Just a data point, hopefully someone else has a more positive mesage. - Rob .
