Advice sought about 64-bit Fedora

[Phil Schaffner]

On Sat, 2005-07-09 at 14:47 -0500, Jonathan Berry wrote:
> On 7/9/05, Anand Buddhdev <arb at anand.org> wrote:
> > Hi fellow list users,
> > 
> > I'm soon going to get an AMD64-based computer. I would like to use a
> > 64-bit linux distro on it, but I'm not yet sure if that is the best
> > thing to do. I am particularly concerned about firefox and plugins. I
> > believe that in order to use the binary plugins like flash and java, I
> > would have to use the i386 version of firefox, instead of the x86_64
> > version.
> 
> This is no problem.  You can easily run the 32-bit version of Firefox
> instead of the 64-bit version.  Plugins will work just fine.  I've
> done this on several version of Fedora.

Well, not quite no problem, but it works.  Can't recall all the gory
details now, but it was a bit tricky getting rid of 32-bit Firefox and
Mozilla without breaking other things.  IIRC, had to do some ugly stuff
with rpm --force to get rid of 64-bit browsers, leave required 64-bit
libs, and install 32-bit browsers to run 32-bit plugins such as
Acroread.

> > I am also concerned about how VMware would run in under 64-bit FC4.
> 
> I have never used VMWare, but looks like you got one positive here.

Running VMwareWorkstation 5.0 on a dual Opteron Tyan K8W MB.  Works
well.

> > Are there users out there using 32-bit software on 64-bit systems? And
> 
> Sure am.  In fact, OpenOffice is 32-bit, so everyone using a 64-bit OS
> and OpenOffice is.  Works just fine.  This is part of the point of the
> AMD64 architecture.  Runs 64-bit, but runs 32-bit as well as 32-bit
> processors.  The only things to watch out for are programs with 32-bit
> only plugins (like firefox or anything using Windows codecs) and
> things that have to go in the kernel (like ndiswrapper for a while
> (though it works now in 64-bit with a 64-bit Windows driver)).
> 
> > what are your experiences like? Would you recommend that I go for the
> > 64-bit version, or should I just install the complete OS as i386 (which
> > kind of defeats the purpose of having an AMD64 processor).
> 
> Definitely go with the 64-bit.  I recently rendered a 3D animation
> under Blender comparing the speed between Windows (32-bit) and Fedora
> (64-bit) and it rendered *more that twice as fast* (180 frames, 64-bit
> 12:35, 32-bit 28:25 (min:sec)) in the 64-bit version.  I need to try
> 32-bit Blender on 64-bit OS and on 32-bit Linux to really have a good
> comparison of the speed difference, but I think this shows that 64-bit
> can be much faster.  If you have problems that you cannot get around,
> you could always install both in a dual-boot configuration.

Agree.  Use the 32-bit stuff where required, 64-bit whenever possible.

> > All opinions and advice will be highly appreciated, and thank you in
> > advance.
> > 
> > Regards,
> > 
> > Anand
> 
> Jonathan
>