Advice sought about 64-bit Fedora
Jonathan Berry
berryja at gmail.com
Sat Jul 9 19:47:43 UTC 2005
On 7/9/05, Anand Buddhdev <arb at anand.org> wrote:
> Hi fellow list users,
>
> I'm soon going to get an AMD64-based computer. I would like to use a
> 64-bit linux distro on it, but I'm not yet sure if that is the best
> thing to do. I am particularly concerned about firefox and plugins. I
> believe that in order to use the binary plugins like flash and java, I
> would have to use the i386 version of firefox, instead of the x86_64
> version.
This is no problem. You can easily run the 32-bit version of Firefox
instead of the 64-bit version. Plugins will work just fine. I've
done this on several version of Fedora.
> I am also concerned about how VMware would run in under 64-bit FC4.
I have never used VMWare, but looks like you got one positive here.
> Are there users out there using 32-bit software on 64-bit systems? And
Sure am. In fact, OpenOffice is 32-bit, so everyone using a 64-bit OS
and OpenOffice is. Works just fine. This is part of the point of the
AMD64 architecture. Runs 64-bit, but runs 32-bit as well as 32-bit
processors. The only things to watch out for are programs with 32-bit
only plugins (like firefox or anything using Windows codecs) and
things that have to go in the kernel (like ndiswrapper for a while
(though it works now in 64-bit with a 64-bit Windows driver)).
> what are your experiences like? Would you recommend that I go for the
> 64-bit version, or should I just install the complete OS as i386 (which
> kind of defeats the purpose of having an AMD64 processor).
Definitely go with the 64-bit. I recently rendered a 3D animation
under Blender comparing the speed between Windows (32-bit) and Fedora
(64-bit) and it rendered *more that twice as fast* (180 frames, 64-bit
12:35, 32-bit 28:25 (min:sec)) in the 64-bit version. I need to try
32-bit Blender on 64-bit OS and on 32-bit Linux to really have a good
comparison of the speed difference, but I think this shows that 64-bit
can be much faster. If you have problems that you cannot get around,
you could always install both in a dual-boot configuration.
> All opinions and advice will be highly appreciated, and thank you in
> advance.
>
> Regards,
>
> Anand
Jonathan
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