On Wed, 2007-01-17 at 19:05 +0000, Peter Alcibiades wrote:

Has anyone successfully used this to install Flash 9 on AMD64 Debian? If so how?

I have heard that it is possible but I am not sure how. Personally I just operate a 32bit installation of Firefox. On Ubuntu I just have a script that launches a 32 bit copy of firefox thus #!/bin/sh export GTK_PATH=/usr/lib32/gtk-2.0 export PANGO_RC_FILE=/etc/pango32/pangorc linux32 /usr/local/firefox_x86/firefox $@ pangorc looks like this [Pango] ModuleFiles=/etc/pango32/pango.modules [PangoX] AliasFiles=/etc/pango/pangox.aliases Make sure you have the following packages (ubuntu naming here so it _should_ be the same for you) linux32 ia32-libs ia32-libs-gtk lib32asound2 Make sure you have no 64 bit instances of firefox running when you launch this otherwise strange things happen (like another thread of the 64bit copy gets spawned) Of course that is still a bit of a bodge as the correct way to do it is to build yourself a 32bit chroot but it seems like a bit of a waste for one application and I never did figure out how to get sound working across a chroot

Wishing I had just installed 32 bit in the first place but dreading what it will take to move to it...

Oh I hear you, you have no idea how many times I have thought that myself. However this was one of the larger annoyances and most if not all of the others have been resolved now too wayne

cl@isbd.net wrote:

advantages of going 64-bit are still not much and the difficulties are considerable.

Is it just that you should have applications compiled for 64-bit (so the usual problems with proprietary vendors refusing to support anything besides i386 or i686) or are there more? At least with x86-64 platforms, there's the possibility of using i386 a lot more painlessly than most platforms. Regards, -- MJR "My other machine is a mipsel."

On Thu, 2007-01-18 at 10:30 +0000, MJ Ray wrote:

Is it just that you should have applications compiled for 64-bit (so the usual problems with proprietary vendors refusing to support anything besides i386 or i686) or are there more?

Well yes that is one of the major problems but at least you can (mostly) just wrap them up in a script or maintain a chroot. In time this will change and the situation can only improve. But also you get other issues. Naturally X86_64 is nowhere near as prevalent as i386, even now that a lot of new machines are 64bit capable a lot of people are still running them with a 32bit distro. So any 64 bit specific bugs (and I have had a few. Kernel bugs and plenty of challenges when I was first playing with XGL) tend to take longer to get discovered and fixed. For a long while OpenOffice was broken for 64 bit users, there was a bug with spadmin that basically prevented any sort of printing. For a reasonable time I had to resort to printing to a file and then printing that file by other means. I guess it is something you have to live with when you are on a less significant platform. In time that will change and to be honest the pain of running 64 bit is nowhere near as bad as it used to be.