32bit vs 64bit

[Kevin Fenzi]

On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:24:42 -0400
csnook at redhat.com (Chris Snook) wrote:

> Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> > Rahul Sundaram writes:
> > 
> >> Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> >>
> >>> However, nothing stops you from installing 32 bit Firefox, which
> >>> will run just fine on a 64 bit Fedora install.
> >>
> >> You don't have to do that. Fedora by default installs
> >> nspluginwrapper which works with the 32-bit plugins on 64-bit
> >> arch. It also has the advantage of adding more stability and
> >> security (via SELinux policy) by separating the plugins into
> >> different process.
> > 
> > Maybe, but I was never able to get it to work. Installing 
> > nspluginwrapper didn't seem to have any effect. Flash never showed
> > up as a registered plugin in Firefox, and there was absolutely no
> > feedback whatsoever, regarding what the problem might be..  When
> > you install the 64-bit distro, you can still run 32-bit apps, and
> > some of them are even included in the 64-bit repos, like firefox.

Note: 
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f8/en_US/sn-Desktop.html#sn-Enabling-Flash-Plugin
and
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f9/en_US/sn-Desktop.html#sn-Enabling-Flash-Plugin

> Installing 32-bit firefox is probably the easier solution, unless
> you're so low on disk space that you can't afford the 32-bit
> libraries.  You probably don't want firefox using more than 3 GB of
> memory at a time anyway.  We include firefox.i386 in the x86-64 repos
> because many people prefer this solution.

No we don't. ;) This is not the case in f9. In f8 firefox was multiarch
due to the firefox-devel package. With the move to xulrunner, firefox
in f9 is no longer multi-arch, meaning the i386 version is not
available in the default x86_64 repos. 

> The 64-bit kernel has a much easier time with memory management on
> boxes with 1 GB or more memory, so even if you're running 32-bit
> apps, it can still help with performance.  If you install 32-bit, and
> want to go 64-bit, you'll need to do a full reinstall.
> 
> -- Chris

kevin

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20080917/00ea31db/attachment-0001.bin