[lug] linux desktop/laptop @ 64bit

Lee Woodworth blug-mail at duboulder.com
Sun Jul 24 10:26:35 MDT 2011


On 07/24/2011 07:29 AM, Davide Del Vento wrote:
> Hi,
> I used to have a linux desktop with a 64-bit installation years ago
> (when x86_64 were just out) and it worked fine, mostly because it
> actually was a fine dual-library with lib (32bits) and lib64.
> Has anybody tried a 64-bit installation nowadays? My understanding is
> that they do pure 64-bit now, not mixed ones anymore (why?)

I've been running 64 bit on servers and laptops for 2+ years now on
Gentoo. All of the main apps are are straight 64-bit:
    libreoffice, thunderbird, firefox, inkscape, gimp, blender,
    gthumb, dvgrab, kdenlive, mysql, postgresl, apache, perl, python,
    kde, xorg-server

The Kernel is also 64 bit. The accelerated 3d  driver for ATI works.
I see repaint errors from time to time, but that may be a KDE issue.

I still have multilib support to able build grub (Gentoo is source based)
and Googleearth (due to an embedded version of wine I think). Googleearth
works mostly but crashes fairly often.

> Is there any problem (the usual suspect are the proprietary binaries
> such as Flash plugin for firefox, Chrome browser, etc)?

I don't use flash so don't know about that. I think you also need to
see what extensions/plugins youtube requires.

> The reason for going 64-bit is to have more than 4GB of memory, but
> still being a user-facing machine (not server) I'd like to have the
> convenience of a fully-fledged system (yes, flash is off 99% of the
> times, thanks to noscript, but that 1% is needed)
> Any suggestions or recommendations welcome!

User processes can also have a larger virtual address-space. This can
be useful for apps that map/remap shared memory regions a lot.

Databases can also use the larger address space. Photo/Video editors
might also benefit.

> Thanks,
> Davide
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