Hard decision

[Ian Burrell]

Mariano López Reta <mlreta <at> alternativagratis.com> writes:
> 
> Fellow co-listers:
> 
> Right now, on my machine, there's a 64bit FC4. The CPU is an Athlon64
> 3000+ with 512MB 400Mhz RAM. Graphics are handled by a GeForce 5200 with
> 128MB. HD is a 160GB 7200RPM Hitachi SATA.
> 
> I'm downloading both x86-64 and i386 versions of FC5, so the big
> question is: should I "downgrade" to i386 in order to get all firefox
> plugins, less compilation hassles when compiling 3rd-party stuff, and
> (mainly) shockwave/flash (unfortunately, most web pages, including home
> banking ones, use flash in my country, so there's no way to avoid it).
> Or should I stick to the 64bit version and face all the inconveniences
> that I have now? Quick answer would be: if you can handle the hassle,
> keep 64. But the deeper question here is: is it worth it to face all the
> hassle? Are there really significant differences in performance?
> 

You can run 32-bit firefox and plugins on 64-bit Fedora.  Yum makes it fairly
easy to set up i386 repositories and install firefox.i386.  You may need to
remove firefox.x86_64 since I don't think they can be installed simultaneously.

The way I have done it in the past is created a core-i386 and updates-i386
repositories.  Basically, copy the .repo files, change $basearch to i386, change
the name.  You can't use the mirrorlist because they include the $ARCH variable.
 This is what my /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-core-i386.repo file looks like:

[core-i386]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch
#baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/$releasever/$basearch/os/
#mirrorlist=http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors/fedora-core-$releasever
baseurl=file:///home/pub/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/os/
enabled=0
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora
file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY

Then do:

yum --enablerepo=core-i386 --enablerepo=updates-i386 install firefox.i386

 - Ian