Looking to upgrade my system. Your thoughts?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Robert Spangler <bms at zoominternet.net>

| I'm looking to upgrade my system with the following;
| 
| Asus A8V Deluxe (v. 2.0) K8T800 Pro Athlon 939-pin
| AMD 64 3500+ 512k 90nm (939)
| Corsair 1G DDR400
| ATI 9600 Pro w/128MB
| 
| Anyone see any problems here?  Should I be watching out for anything 
| that FC3 might give me a problem with?

I run FC3 on x86_64.  Pretty good, but not as tested as i386.

- rpm handles "multilib" (the ability to have the same library
  installed several times, once for each architecture), but
  has at least one mostly harmless bug:
    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=144747

  apt-get does not handle multilib correctly.

  Supposedly, yum does understand multilib.

- some things are not available in x86_64

  - ivtv doesn't yet work for me.  I have submitted some
    patches that have been accepted and some that have not.

  - there is no 64-bit Flash plugin, so if you need Flash
    you need to use a 32-bit browser

  - 64-bit ndiswrapper is very new and may still be shakey.
    Few 64-bit MS Windows wireless drivers exist anyway.

  - I don't know whether ATI has made available proprietary X drivers
    for x86_64.  So far, I have not been seduced by binary-only
    drivers.

- some key repositories don't have pre-built x86_64 binaries and it is
  hit-or-miss whether their source RPMs build correctly on x86_64.
  Those that do have binaries may not have tested them.

- within one process, you are not supposed to mix x86_64 and i386
  code.  That is why the plugins (like Flash) may dictate the
  architecture of the brower you use.  That is also why there must be
  both i386 and x86_64 versions of each library.

| Now for the dumb question:  After I install FC#/64bit when/if I would 
| compile a program, would it be compiled to use the full 64bit or would I 
| be running a 32bit app on a 64bit system?

You have control over this.  By default, things are byild for 64-bit.

You probably want to know how to build from a source RPM because there
are useful packages that don't come pre-compiled for x86_64.

Hints:
	You want to build as yourself, not root.
	To do this, you ought to have a ~/.rpmmacros confiutation
	file.  Here's mine
# cd /home/hugh ; mkdir rpmbuilds ; cd rpmbuilds ; mkdir SPECS BUILD SRPMS RPMS RPMS/i386
%_topdir        /home/hugh/rpmbuilds
	The first line is a comment that contains a shell command line
	to set up required directories in which to build.

	to install a source RPM:
		rpm -iv thing.source.rpm

	to build from an installed source RPM:

		rpmbuild -ba ~/rpmbuilds/SPECS/thing.spec

	(The actual name of the .spec file may vary, but it will be
	in that directory).

	The created rpms will be within the build tree: rpmbuilds/RPMS