It really was this series of hassles that stopped me... it's hard to
find a free flash plugin :-) I had a devil of a time trying to get
flash to work with a 32bit chrooted environment, along with some other
random things that I'm forgetting because I ended up reinstalling 32bit
just to dodge these problems.
I guess it just depends on your priorities. I usually consider it a
feature when the flash plugin isn't working...
If you have >860MB of RAM you should run 64-bit just because you will get a
performance boost.
Is this really true? I would imagine it's definitely true for ram >
2GB, because the linux mem model (IIRC) splits user and kernel mem into
2GB halves, but I don't know where the 860MB number comes from. 860 ==
1101011100 in binary, so there's no clear boundary there...
Typo, I meant 896MB. If you have a machine with > 896MB you end up using
HIGHMEM. I can't do an adequate job explaining what this is all about,
but basically if you use more than 896MB of memory the OS has to jump
through some extra page-table manipulations to access those regions.
And of course, if you have more than 4GB of RAM in your system you will
have even bigger slowdowns if you run a 32-bit kernel.
I personally feel like running a 32-bit kernel on a 64-bit system because
the flash plugin won't work is sort of like buying a V8 car but disabling
4 of the cylinders because it lets you hear the radio better, but that's
just me. [no computer discussion is complete w/o a strained car analogy].
To answer the question in the original e-mail, I've used both Fedora and
SuSE on 64-bit x86_64 systems w/o problems.
I also run debian on 64-bit Alpha, SPARC, MIPS, PowerPC, Itanium and
PA-RISC systems, also without problems.
Vince
