Kevin J. Cummings <cummings <at> kjchome.homeip.net> writes:
The OP asked for "any and all advice". Please don't
change the subject.
Are you going to give out fishing or gardening advice next? How about cooking?
Of course he meant "any and all advice" relevant to his question...
No, actually, there were 2 different problems. The first was an
x86_64
only problem as a symbol was no longer exported by the x86_64 kernel
that fglrx relied upon, but was still present in the i386 kernel.
The second problem was common to both i386 and x86_64.
But as fglrx was useless on F9 either way, the x86_64 issue didn't make it any
worse.
Having 2 problems on x86_64 made it more difficult to diagnose and
track
down.
It was well documented that fglrx was not updated for the new X11 in F9, please
read the release notes and the list of known issues next time, then you don't
waste your time "diagnosing" well-known issues.
Not for me, but just look at all of the question in this list alone
for
people asking why it doesn't work for them.
If it can wean those people off their dependency on proprietary plugins, that's
a good thing. :-p
But seriously, having to run one single line when installing third-party stuff
which is NOT part of Fedora is not quite a "hassle". And there's also other
stuff you have to install by hand for various proprietary stuff, for example
libflashsupport.i386 which is not installed by default even on i386 and which
is needed to get working sound with PulseAudio in Flash 9 (Flash 10 has finally
be fixed to use ALSA properly so it works with the PulseAudio ALSA plugin, as
usual, proprietary software lags behind).
The OP was talking about a change from FC6 to F9, just like I had
done.
He's actually running F7, not FC6. And he was asking about the choice between
F9 i386 and F9 x86_64.
> The original is not Free Software, so of course it will cause
more problems
> than the replacements which are.
Actually, the original reader is available for free download. Don't
cloud the issue.
I said Free Software, not freeware. Free Software is about freedom, not price.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
(And the opposite is "proprietary software", which includes proprietary
freeware like the stuff Adobe releases for no cost.)
You are the one clouding the issue.
PDF was designed (and released) by Adobe.
That doesn't mean their reader is the best one. It's actually ugly, slow,
proprietary and not well-integrated into the distro.
Fedora is a Free Software (and as above, I mean "free" as in "free
speech"
there, not as in "free beer"!) distribution, of course Free Software (as
in "speech") will be better supported than proprietary software. So you should
not be surprised that you get asked why you don't just use one of the Free
Software alternatives which are included in Fedora and work perfectly fine when
you complain about issues with the proprietary Adobe Reader.
Its their reader that doesn't have an x86_64 release,
And that's one of the issues with it, but...
and therefore is the problem causing us to have to use
nspluginwrapper.
... you don't have to use it as a browser plugin, you can just run it as an
external process.
And the fact that you have to install *BOTH* versions of
nspluginwrapper
(.i386 and .x86_64) makes it even more confusing.
Of course you do, you need the x86_64 version to actually plug into the browser
and the i386 version to actually run the plugin. It's the whole principle of
how nspluginwrapper works.
But as far as I know, nspluginwrapper.x86_64 is actually installed by default
for Firefox users these days.
Lack of available x86_64 is a hassle in my book. The latest copy is
still a BETA (or was when I last downloaded it). Not everyone *wants*
to run BETA software.
If the beta is the only version that actually works, why not?
Proprietary software will always lag behind, and they'll always label their
much needed updates as "beta" because they're paranoid about supporting new
features. You'll have to get used to use betas if you want to run proprietary
software on a fast-moving GNU/Linux distribution such as Fedora. And it's not
just x86_64, for example the only version of fglrx supporting F9 at all (even
i386) is a beta.
Because of the way I upgraded from FC6, I'm not running
PulseAudio....
Perhaps that *my* problem. I like to think that's Fedora's lack of
proper upgrade path problem.
Easy to fix again (and not a 64-bit issue, but an upgrade issue, still it's
relevant for the OP who's upgrading for F7):
If you run GNOME:
yum groupinstall sound-and-video gnome-desktop
If you run KDE, this should be enough:
yum install kde-settings-pulseaudio
but you can also use:
yum groupinstall sound-and-video kde-desktop
to get the other new stuff in those groups.
See also
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq (some of the information
in which can be helpful even if you upgrade the official way, through
Anaconda).
Kevin Kofler