On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 09:48:38PM -0500, Jay Cliburn wrote:
I'm indifferent to browser make and model, myself; Firefox just
seems to
be in vogue and I'm accustomed to it now. But the enduring headache for
a number of FC x86_64 users is the absence of 64-bit Macromedia Flash
and Sun Java plugins -- despite the availability gnash and blackdown and
nspluginwrapper -- and fedoraforum is chock full of people trying to
figure out how to add i386 repos and install and keep up to date a
"foreign" arch package in x86_64. For some AMD64 owners, the decision
whether to use FCx.i386 or FCx.x86_64 is swayed to i386 by the simple
desire to avoid the wrestling match with 32-bit Firefox and its plugins
in a 64-bit Fedora. (A cursory search of the AMD64 forum at fedoraforum
will bear out this assertion.)
I wrote a howto at fedoraforum that lays out the steps to get 32-bit
Firefox installed with Flash and Sun Java in x86_64, but I'm
occasionally astonished at just how badly people can muck it up by not
following the instructions to the letter, and sometimes they run into
gnarly dependency problems that may or may not be of their own making.
Having 32-bit Firefox in the x86_64 repo significantly simplifies the
whole process, and would be cheered by many a new Fedora/AMD64 user.
Much as it is highly annoying, other distributions such as OpenSuSE
have started shipping only the 32-bit Firefox or equivalent on AMD64,
and not shipping a 64-bit Firefox at all, for exactly this reason.
Idea being work must happen in the background to get 64-bit Java and
other plugins to work, but until then, don't dork over your end
users. You loose a lot of bully pulpit, but you make for happier users.
--
Matt Domsch
Software Architect
Dell Linux Solutions
linux.dell.com &
www.dell.com/linux
Linux on Dell mailing lists @
http://lists.us.dell.com