Fedora 9 32 or 64 Bit - Which One?

[Kevin J. Cummings]

Charlie McVeigh wrote:
> I apologize if this question has been asked before.   I have a new
> Thinkpad T61 in scheduled to arrive sometime next week.  I want to
> install Fedora 9 on it.   Being as it has a Core 2 Duo processor, I
> assume I can install the 64 bit version of Fedora 9.  My question is
> what are the pros and cons that I need to consider when choosing 32 or
> 64 bit version of Fedora 9?  I am currently using a Thinkpad T42
> running Fedora Core 7, so I have no experience with 64 bit linux or
> associated issues.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any and all advice.

Well, this has been answered very well previous to my reply, but let me 
add my experience to the mix.

If you are willing to deal with the issues, then x86_64 is for you.  If 
not, then stick with the i386 stuff.

I upgraded a working FC6.i386 installation on my laptop to F9.x86_64.
(Intel Core Duo T7200 @ 2GHz)

While the upgrade was not without problems, it went pretty smoothly once 
I forced it (ie, many "yum update" commands by hand, and reading the F9 
release notes)!  At the end I had a working F9.x86_64 system with the 
following "issues":

1) My lappie has an ATI Mobile Radeon X1600 video system.  It worked on 
FC6 using the fglrx driver from livna.  F9 upgraded Xorg to a version 
that fglrx does not yet support.  OK, so its back to using the radeon 
driver under F9.  It mostly works (I can still watch videos), but I 
can't help but feel that fglrx will give me better performance than I am 
currently getting.  I tried the radeonhd driver and couldn't get it to 
work for me.

2) Many firefox plugins require nspluginwrapper because there are no 
x86_64 versions for them (Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader).  Getting it to 
work correctly is straightforward and the Fedora Project Documentation 
is correct if you follow it.  Sometimes Flash just doesn't work until I 
restart firefox.  And the Acrobat embedded reader can bring the laptop 
to its knees with some sort of memory leak.  Its also not as fast going 
through the nspluginwrapper.  I sometimes have to wait 4-5 minutes for 
the embedded page to actually display (and sometimes it comes up right 
away).  npviewer.bin is the application that sometimes runs wild. 
Especially if I am viewing a number of different PDFs sequentially and 
using the browser's BACK button between them.  Some people have 
configured their browsers to run acroread as an external application 
directly (instead of the embedded reader) to get around this.

3) Sometimes sound gets screwed up in the browser (firefox).  Even when 
using gecko-mediaplayer.  Restarting the browser, or sometimes 
restarting the X session is necessary.

4) If you want to run vmware-server you might want to upgrade to the 
version 2.0 BETA which has an X86_64 RPM.  (the version 1 version is 
i386 only).  I had no trouble running the .i386 version of vmware-server 
with the appropriate compatibility libraries.  Now I'm running the 
x86_64 BETA and it runs my 32-bit virtual machine just fine.  You *MAY* 
need to find the latest version of vmware-anyanyupdate (or you may not) 
for vmware-server version 1.

5) Finding x86_64 versions of Firefox and Thunderbird ADDONs can be an 
adventure.  So can finding addons that support firefox 3.0 in some cases.

6) WINE is i386 only.  I tried to get sound working in WINE and 
discovered that it wanted to drag in lots of i386 libraries, not all of 
which were compatible with all of the x86_64 versions I have installed 
(some from livna, some from atrpms, some from fedora).  I gave up on the 
conflicts and continue to run wine without support for sound.

7) FC6 used cubbi-suspend2 kernels in order to suspend and hiberate 
correctly.  I was unable to make the tuxonice kernels work for me on F9, 
but the stock kernel support works fine with F9.  (It may not be as fast 
as tuxonice, but it does suspend/hibernate and restore without any major 
problems.)

8) My wireless is now much more reliable with F9, but that could be the 
new iwl3945 driver and not the old ipw3945 driver.

YMMV

> Charlie

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)