[ale] Fedora 9 64 bit

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Thu, 2008-08-21 at 19:38 -0400, Scott Castaline wrote:
> Thinking of going 64 bit. Is it pretty much ready for primetime? From 
> what I've been able to see, it looks like Fedora has the 32 bit on a
> 64 
> bit system issues pretty much resolved, but I keep seeing some issues
> in 
> regards to plug-ins for FF & or T-Bird.

The short answer:  Almost.  There are still a few lingering issues, but
they should be pretty well worked out soon.

Some plugins that are 32-bit only are going to be sticking points.  Not
sure how Fedora does their 64-bit distribution, but I really am
beginning to wish that there wasn't such dedication to 64-bits the way
that there seems to be in GNU/Linux distributions, generally.  There's
little reason for *everything* in userland to be *purely* 64-bit.

I have wondered a bit about what it would take for a system to be
installed, single-disc, that has both 32-bit and 64-bit software on it.
It would take (approximately) twice as much time to build, and
(approximately) twice as much disk space, but in theory, anyway,
something like Apple's “Universal” binary system concept for PPC/x86
could be applied in some way to systems running Linux.

It would require some help from the kernel, I would think, but it'd
probably be a no-go because I don't know that ELF is a standard that can
be up for modification, and I am fairly certain that nobody wants to go
through a change in file formats like what happened back in the days of
the a.out to ELF conversion.

The alternative, which is feasible for distributions, is to have both
32-bit and 64-bit libraries installed on the system (that is, when a
package is installed, it contains binaries for both), and then 32-bit
programs can be installed the same way in either a different directory
tree or by simply appending "32" to the command file name (i.e., 64-bit
Firefox would be "/usr/bin/firefox" and 32-bit Firefox on a 64-bit
system would be "/usr/bin/firefox32", or something like that).  Does any
distribution do such a thing that anyone knows of?  Because without
doing something like that, I don't know that 64-bit systems will be
ready for "primetime" until Java works completely and reliably on 64-bit
architectures.  (The open source Sun Java project is making tremendous
progress there, but I don't know if they've finished implementing
everything that was encumbered yet.)

That having been said, just about everything else I use is perfectly
fine.  I've been running 64-bit Ubuntu without falling back to a 32-bit
system since the Hardy release, and the only thing that doesn't work for
me is Java.  Flash works (mostly), but it has some issues here and
there.  The 32-bit plugin wrapper seems to help work around those at
least some of the time.  Supposedly, Flash 10 is supposed to work again,
but I'm not even sure about that, given that Flash and some Linux
systems that use PulseAudio seem to have issues.  Then again, Java
doesn't like PA either, preferring instead to open the ALSA sound card
directly and exclusively.

It'd be nice for Adobe to make a 64-bit Flash, and it'd be nice for the
OpenJDK/IcedTea projects to get things wrapped up so that client-side
Java works on 64-bit machines properly... but we'll see what happens in
the near future.

	--- Mike

-- 
My sigfile ran away and is on hiatus.
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