On Fri, 2006-02-24 at 10:34 -0500, Jim Perrin wrote:
> On 2/24/06, Robin Mordasiewicz <robin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, Kari Salovaara wrote:
> >
> > > I've Intel(r) Pentium(r) D processor 820 in my desktop.
> > > Which version should I install, i386 or x86_64 ?
> > > I understand that i386 works but how is x86_64 ?
> > > If I understand correctly, this processor is also EM64T.
> > > Which are cons and pros ?
> >
> > if your processor is EM64T then install the x86_64 version.
> > there are no cons. You will experience performance increases.
>
> There are always cons... There are some user-end things which don't
> play well in a true 64bit environment. Flash is a good example. I'm
> not sure if this has been resolved or not, but flash didn't support
> x86_64, and so would not render on pages. The fix was to install the
> x86 browser, libs and flash versions. I'm not rich enough to have
> x86_64 yet, so I don't know if this still applies.
And of course, the way you solve this is to have both the i386 and
x86_64 versions installed.
This is a huge con, as it becomes much harder to maintain updates. You
need to modify you rpmmacros to see both the i386 and x86_64 packages.
If you are going to try to compile anything on a multi-lib arch machine,
you will need to create separate chroots (or VMs with xen / vmware.
etc.) so that you can compile programs that work on either another
x86_64 or i386 machine ... as 64 bit and 32bit stuff will be compiled
otherwise.
You will also have problems getting some i386 software installed over
the x86_64 software as there are shared doc files and shared man files
the sometimes conflict with each other.
Personally ... unless I know for a fact that I will not need any i386
software, I install i386 and not x86_64 distro. If I wanted a
workstation, I would not install x86_64. That is just my opinion.
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