That's very useful feedback, actually. Thanks to you and the others who
said similar things. Truth be told, I don't really understand the
practical advantage of a 64-bit OS over a 32-bit one (I mean, I understand
that it uses 64-bit instructions, but I don't understand the implications
of that), so I wasn't able to judge the utility of going with a 64-bit
version of the OS versus an i386 version. In any case, I didn't realize
it would be a problem to use i386 binaries.
When I thought about it after I discovered the problem, I thought it
probably came down to the fact that (AFAIK) until now MS hasn't offered a
64-bit OS aimed at the consumer destop, so most commerical apps will be
32-bit and any DLL nabbed from Windows will also be 32-bit. If Vista sees
much adoption, presumably this will change in the near future.
I had heard some things to suggest that other distros like Fedora might
deal with the issue more gracefully, so I thought it was worth looking
into before retreating to i386.
Thanks,
Nick
On Fri, 9 Feb 2007, Rob Sherwood 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
.
