Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2005 21:13:02 -0500 From: Gregory Avedissian <gma2004@verizon.net> I just put together a new machine for a friend. Sempron 3100 on ASUS K8V-MX. It was a rush job, because the computer she was using died. (Same one I wrote about recently that was having lockup problems - pretty sure now that it was the power supply. The last time she tried to turn it on, a big spark came out the back, and that was the end of it. Memory and vid card still test good.) So now that she has a shiny new 64-bit system, I'm wondering whether to go with 64-bit OS or stick to 32. I haven't had much time to research it, but I understand that there are some problems with Macromedia Flash and Java, which she needs. Some of the reading I've done suggests that you can install the 32-bit version of Firefox with the plugins to get around this. Anyone know if it's really as easy as that? Are there any problems with running 32-bit software on a 64-bit OS? Any particular bugginess with 64 that I should know about in advance? She runs KDE desktop and uses Gimp a lot. I hate to say it, but I installed 32-bit SUSE on my Athlon 64 for the following reasons: 1) It was always a pain in the butt syncing up software between my laptop (32-bit) and the 64-bit software. 2) Valgrind didn't work at the time (9.1 timeframe) on 64-bit code, which made it all but useless. Yes, it's possible to forcibly compile things in 32-bit mode, but it was a real pain when most of the development libraries were 64-bit only. 3) Yes, Java, Flash, etc. didn't work. That was generally a fairly minor nuisance, and there are no guarantees with 32-bit software. Right now the Adobe PDF plugin doesn't work on 32-bit SUSE 10.0 because it's compiled with an older version of g++ than what SUSE uses. The usual grief with proprietary software. -- Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu> Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net Project lead for Gimp Print -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton