On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 08:35:05AM +0000, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
Tim wondered: would you recommend upgrading to a 64bit environment?
Definitely not. In fact, the solution to my own problems might be to do a clean install of a 32 bit environment. Its just not worth the aggravation. Maybe if you need to be able to address more memory. Or if you don't install all kinds of odd things that are 32 bit only - something which has given me untold grief. There don't seem to be any gains, and there is lots of aggravation.
I have narrowed down the FF .xsession-errors issue a bit further, it seems to have something to do with the user, and to be not just with FF. I created another user, started up FF, exercised it a bit, and the errors file was empty.
So another and less drastic action than doing a new clean install might be to create a new user and move all the files over. But equally, maybe the thing to do is just get it over with and move to 32 bit.
I have two systems with 64-bit installations on them. I went for 64-bit because both have significantly more than 4Gb or memory, one has 6Gb and the other has 8Gb. The major reason for wanting lots of memory is that I run Vmware (soon to be VirtualBox) to host Windows XP for a few remaining 'legacy' things that I need Windows for.
The older system has Fedora 8 and there 64-bit was a bit of hassle but not huge. To overcome the most inconvenient things (for me) I installed and used 32-bit Firefox on that system, it uses a fair amount of disk space for all the extra libraries but that's about all, 32-bit compatibility mode on a 64-bit system is very transparent.
The newer system (set to replace the old one) is xubuntu 64-bit and, so far, has been just about hassle free. The fan's noisier though! :-)