Kevin J. Cummings <cummings <at> kjchome.homeip.net> writes:
If you are willing to deal with the issues, then x86_64 is for you.
If
not, then stick with the i386 stuff.
What issues?
1) My lappie has an ATI Mobile Radeon X1600 video system. It worked
on
FC6 using the fglrx driver from livna. F9 upgraded Xorg to a version
that fglrx does not yet support.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with x86_64, it's exactly the same on F9
i386.
2) Many firefox plugins require nspluginwrapper because there are no
x86_64 versions for them (Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader). Getting it to
work correctly is straightforward and the Fedora Project Documentation
is correct if you follow it.
So what's the problem there?
Sometimes Flash just doesn't work until I restart firefox. And
the Acrobat
embedded reader can bring the laptop to its knees with some sort of memory
leak. Its also not as fast going through the nspluginwrapper.
But nspluginwrapper is used by default even on 32-bit installations for
security reasons (because running the plugin in a separate process allows
confining it with SELinux).
Some people have configured their browsers to run acroread as an
external
application directly (instead of the embedded reader) to get around this.
Or just don't use acroread at all, that's what Okular and Evince are for.
Konqueror can even embed Okular as a KPart if that's important to you.
3) Sometimes sound gets screwed up in the browser (firefox). Even
when
using gecko-mediaplayer. Restarting the browser, or sometimes
restarting the X session is necessary.
I don't think this is related to 64-bit either.
4) If you want to run vmware-server you might want to upgrade to the
version 2.0 BETA which has an X86_64 RPM. (the version 1 version is
i386 only). I had no trouble running the .i386 version of vmware-server
with the appropriate compatibility libraries. Now I'm running the
x86_64 BETA and it runs my 32-bit virtual machine just fine. You *MAY*
need to find the latest version of vmware-anyanyupdate (or you may not)
for vmware-server version 1.
So where's the problem?
5) Finding x86_64 versions of Firefox and Thunderbird ADDONs can be
an
adventure.
OK, this is one valid argument. But the addons most people actually use should
be available for x86_64.
So can finding addons that support firefox 3.0 in some cases.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with x86_64, it's exactly the same on F9
i386.
6) WINE is i386 only. I tried to get sound working in WINE and
discovered that it wanted to drag in lots of i386 libraries, not all of
which were compatible with all of the x86_64 versions I have installed
(some from livna, some from atrpms, some from fedora). I gave up on the
conflicts and continue to run wine without support for sound.
I don't know how you ended up with all those conflicts. You should not need
anything not in Fedora to get sound in WINE working. "yum install
alsa-plugins-pulseaudio.i386" should be enough, and that drags in only stuff
from Fedora.
7) FC6 used cubbi-suspend2 kernels in order to suspend and hiberate
correctly. I was unable to make the tuxonice kernels work for me on F9,
but the stock kernel support works fine with F9. (It may not be as fast
as tuxonice, but it does suspend/hibernate and restore without any major
problems.)
This has nothing whatsoever to do with x86_64, it's exactly the same on F9
i386.
8) My wireless is now much more reliable with F9, but that could be
the
new iwl3945 driver and not the old ipw3945 driver.
This is actually a good thing, not a problem. :-) In any case, it's not
x86_64-specific either.
Kevin Kofler