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.
Peter
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! :-)
On Mon, 2008-11-17 at 08:35 +0000, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
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.
That's a shame, Here I have been 64bit on my main machine for almost 4 years now. Initially I had some problems with 32bit only software and having to run a 32bit instance of Firefox for flash etc.
This was also back in the days of OpenOffice 1.x which couldn't print directly in 64bit mode because spadmin was broken.
Then I had a couple of 64bit specific bugs that bit me and then I started messing about with compiz which at the time needed svn checkouts etc to work in 64bit mode.
But for the last couple of years I would say the 64bit experience on ubuntu has been no problem whatsoever. I hardly notice to be honest as with ubuntu things like the pluginwrapper for flash are done automagically.
I do have a few 32bit only things installed such as Skype, Zattoo and a few 32bit games. Most things just work if you have the ia32libs package installed..other things need tricks like linux32 (which itself is a wrapper for setarch to fool stuff) but generally any software that braindead I try to avoid. If you are in a real fix on Debian/Ubuntu there is getlibs but I haven't worked out if that is made of evil or not.
As to the benefits, apart from the support for more memory I have seen notable performance improvements in only a few things..I do encode media quite a bit and I have seen perhaps 20-30% here.
The very sad thing here is the lack of commercial support for 64bit systems...this is also true in the Windows Camp. With new machines pretty much being 64bit capable by default and coming with 2GB as standard it is time the software industry woke up and realised that pretty soon the 64bit arch will have to be the dominant platform.
Hi,
2008/11/17 Wayne Stallwood ALUGlist@digimatic.co.uk:
On Mon, 2008-11-17 at 08:35 +0000, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
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.
That's a shame, Here I have been 64bit on my main machine for almost 4 years now. Initially I had some problems with 32bit only software and having to run a 32bit instance of Firefox for flash etc.
I am indeed a little worried (but only just a little) about moving to 64bit for the moment, due to possible incompatibilities with userspace apps.
What I'm looking at as a possible intermediate step in my transition to 64 bit, is a 64bit kernel and 32 bit userspace. I can then spend some time testing things out like that, and then move over to full 64bit userland. Is this possible? Is it troublesome? Does anyone have any experience regarding this that they would like to share?
Thanks Srdjan
On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 10:58:15AM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Mon, 2008-11-17 at 08:35 +0000, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
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.
That's a shame, Here I have been 64bit on my main machine for almost 4 years now. Initially I had some problems with 32bit only software and having to run a 32bit instance of Firefox for flash etc.
My only 64 bit on desktop issue these days is Flash, which works for a bit and then dies (64 bit Iceweasel, nspluginwrapper and 32 bit Flash), but I'm hopefully that Adobe's announcement of 64 bit Flash for Linux will solve that one:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/17/adobe_64_bit_linux_flash_10_alpha/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/
(I'll be trying it tonight when I'm back at my home box, which is the 64 bit one.)
J.
-
Chris G -
Jonathan McDowell -
Peter Alcibiades -
Srdjan Todorovic -
Wayne Stallwood