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.