[ALUG] Re: nspluginwrapper

[Wayne Stallwood]

On Thu, 2007-01-18 at 10:30 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> Is it just that you should have applications compiled for 64-bit (so
> the usual problems with proprietary vendors refusing to support
> anything besides i386 or i686) or are there more? 

Well yes that is one of the major problems but at least you can (mostly)
just wrap them up in a script or maintain a chroot. In time this will
change and the situation can only improve.

But also you get other issues. Naturally X86_64 is nowhere near as
prevalent as i386, even now that a lot of new machines are 64bit capable
a lot of people are still running them with a 32bit distro. So any 64
bit specific bugs (and I have had a few. Kernel bugs and plenty of
challenges when I was first playing with XGL) tend to take longer to get
discovered and fixed.

For a long while OpenOffice was broken for 64 bit users, there was a bug
with spadmin that basically prevented any sort of printing. For a
reasonable time I had to resort to printing to a file and then printing
that file by other means.

I guess it is something you have to live with when you are on a less
significant platform. In time that will change and to be honest the pain
of running 64 bit is nowhere near as bad as it used to be.