I'm thinking of moving from Slackware to Fedora for my next upgrade.
There are a number of reasons for this:-
I have Fedora on my desktop at work and have found it quite good (and easy) to work with, an additional advantage of course is having the same distribution in both places.
It's more compatible with Vmware, Vmware can be installed on Slackware as a host but it's a bit of a fiddle. While Fedora isn't 'supported' by Vmware, RedHat is supported and Fedora is similar enough to RedHat for Vmware to install simply.
I'm thinking of going to a 64-Bit OS and there isn't a 64-bit version of Slackware.
Can anyone envisage any bit 'gotchas' if I do this? Are there any major pitfalls when moving from 32-bit to 64-bit?
On Tue, 18 Sep 2007, Chris G wrote:
I'm thinking of going to a 64-Bit OS and there isn't a 64-bit version of Slackware.
Oh really? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slamd64 http://www.bluewhite64.com/news.php
Slackware is great! ;)
- Srdjan
On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 09:15:38PM +0100, Srdjan Todorovic wrote:
On Tue, 18 Sep 2007, Chris G wrote:
I'm thinking of going to a 64-Bit OS and there isn't a 64-bit version of Slackware.Oh really? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slamd64 http://www.bluewhite64.com/news.php
... but I need to be fairly 'mainstream' to be able to run Vmware easily, going to either of the above would make installing Vmware even more messy/fiddly.
Slackware is great! ;)
Yes, I quite agree, which is why I have stayed with it for such a long time. I may well return after my foray to Fedora! :-)
On Tue, 2007-09-18 at 20:59 +0100, Chris G wrote:
Can anyone envisage any bit 'gotchas' if I do this? Are there any major pitfalls when moving from 32-bit to 64-bit?
Having run 64bit for the last 3 years I would say "some" but the situation is getting better.
Primarily now you will have the following problems
No 64bit flash but you can't use the 32bit flash plugin with a 64bit browser without trickery. Solution manually install a 32bit browser or ignore flash content until they fix it.
Some closed source 32 bit only applications (skype, games etc) can have issues and may need twiddling or running through linux32 with the 32 bit versions of various libs installed.
Increased memory footprint for little gain on many things
In some cases you end up with a different bug list to those running 32bit distros, I had this for ages with OpenOffice where spadmin (OpenOffice printing) was completely broken on 64bit. Also I have from time to time had 64bit specific kernel issues that due to the smaller number of users/testers have taken longer to be detected, confirmed and fixed but thankfully this seems to have reduced somewhat in recent times.
Generally now it doesn't give me too much bother, and given that a good percentage of modern processors are 64bit capable and we are edging towards the memory addressing limitations of 32bit computing it is only a matter of time before 64bit becomes the norm for performance desktop computing so most of these problems will be resolved through necessity
On 9/18/07, Wayne Stallwood ALUGlist@digimatic.co.uk wrote:
Generally now it doesn't give me too much bother, and given that a good percentage of modern processors are 64bit capable and we are edging towards the memory addressing limitations of 32bit computing it is only a matter of time before 64bit becomes the norm for performance desktop computing so most of these problems will be resolved through necessity
Even Microsoft are doing their bit to encourage 64bit Windows since the release of Vista by forcing developers to submit 64bit drivers through Microsoft's driver signing processes before they can submit 32bit drivers for the same hardware.
Apart from the limitation of the maximum amount of addressable memory, what are the advantages of going 64bit as a user?
Tim.
On 19/09/2007, Tim Green timothy.j.green@gmail.com wrote:
Even Microsoft are doing their bit to encourage 64bit Windows since the release of Vista by forcing developers to submit 64bit drivers through Microsoft's driver signing processes before they can submit 32bit drivers for the same hardware.
People might take them up on the offer if they weren't so bloody greedy and forcing people to fork out money for both the 32 and 64-bit versions of Vista.
I have been tempted, in the past, just to buy an Technet Plus CDless subscription so that I just pay 250 quid per year to get everything that I need from them for "unlimited evaluation".
Apart from the limitation of the maximum amount of addressable memory, what are the advantages of going 64bit as a user?
Depends on what you do.
Here in the film industry, 64-bitness is helping with rendering performance and also on the desktop where artists need to use vast chunks of memory for their 3D and even 2D packages. And it also helps in virtualisation. You can do away with dual machine set-ups (i.e. one Linux, one Windows) and having just ONE workstation which has loads of RAM and dual dual core processors running virtualisation software. Works well.
So 64-bitness does help depending on what tasks you give your computer to do. Not worth it for word processing or surfing the Internet, but bloody useful for large computational work.
Regards,
Martyn
On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 11:48:20PM +0100, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Tue, 2007-09-18 at 20:59 +0100, Chris G wrote:
Can anyone envisage any bit 'gotchas' if I do this? Are there any major pitfalls when moving from 32-bit to 64-bit?
Having run 64bit for the last 3 years I would say "some" but the situation is getting better.
Primarily now you will have the following problems
No 64bit flash but you can't use the 32bit flash plugin with a 64bit browser without trickery. Solution manually install a 32bit browser or ignore flash content until they fix it.
That's probably the most significant problem for me, it's just a fact of life that I need to go to some web sites that use Flash.
Presumably I could run a 32-bit Vmware guest to use when needed.
Some closed source 32 bit only applications (skype, games etc) can have issues and may need twiddling or running through linux32 with the 32 bit versions of various libs installed.
Probably not an issue, I don't use Skype and don't play games.
Increased memory footprint for little gain on many things
In some cases you end up with a different bug list to those running 32bit distros, I had this for ages with OpenOffice where spadmin (OpenOffice printing) was completely broken on 64bit. Also I have from time to time had 64bit specific kernel issues that due to the smaller number of users/testers have taken longer to be detected, confirmed and fixed but thankfully this seems to have reduced somewhat in recent times.
Generally now it doesn't give me too much bother, and given that a good percentage of modern processors are 64bit capable and we are edging towards the memory addressing limitations of 32bit computing it is only a matter of time before 64bit becomes the norm for performance desktop computing so most of these problems will be resolved through necessity
The reason I'm considering going to a 64-bit installation is that I run Vmware and using more than 4Gb of memory would be a useful capability (not that I actually have more than 4Gb yet!).
Thanks for the helpful response.
Wayne Stallwood wrote:
No 64bit flash but you can't use the 32bit flash plugin with a 64bit browser without trickery. Solution manually install a 32bit browser or ignore flash content until they fix it.
It's worth considering Gnash (the Gnu Flash implementation), as that does have 64-bit plugins.
If you do this, expect other problems (expecting Gnash to work like Flash is like expecting Wine to work like Windows at the moment) but very often it will do what you need. However, you'll need to install the Firefox FlashBlock plugin to prevent flash objects being loaded unless you want them to, as Gnash does sometimes (in my experience) get stuck at 100% CPU and take your browser with it. Actually FlashBlock is worth having anyway, even with real Flash plugins.
Mark Rogers
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Chris G -
Mark Rogers -
Martyn Drake -
Srdjan Todorovic -
Tim Green -
Wayne Stallwood