On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 09:48:38PM -0500, Jay Cliburn wrote: > I'm indifferent to browser make and model, myself; Firefox just seems to > be in vogue and I'm accustomed to it now. But the enduring headache for > a number of FC x86_64 users is the absence of 64-bit Macromedia Flash > and Sun Java plugins -- despite the availability gnash and blackdown and > nspluginwrapper -- and fedoraforum is chock full of people trying to > figure out how to add i386 repos and install and keep up to date a > "foreign" arch package in x86_64. For some AMD64 owners, the decision > whether to use FCx.i386 or FCx.x86_64 is swayed to i386 by the simple > desire to avoid the wrestling match with 32-bit Firefox and its plugins > in a 64-bit Fedora. (A cursory search of the AMD64 forum at fedoraforum > will bear out this assertion.) > > I wrote a howto at fedoraforum that lays out the steps to get 32-bit > Firefox installed with Flash and Sun Java in x86_64, but I'm > occasionally astonished at just how badly people can muck it up by not > following the instructions to the letter, and sometimes they run into > gnarly dependency problems that may or may not be of their own making. > Having 32-bit Firefox in the x86_64 repo significantly simplifies the > whole process, and would be cheered by many a new Fedora/AMD64 user. Much as it is highly annoying, other distributions such as OpenSuSE have started shipping only the 32-bit Firefox or equivalent on AMD64, and not shipping a 64-bit Firefox at all, for exactly this reason. Idea being work must happen in the background to get 64-bit Java and other plugins to work, but until then, don't dork over your end users. You loose a lot of bully pulpit, but you make for happier users. -- Matt Domsch Software Architect Dell Linux Solutions linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux Linux on Dell mailing lists @ http://lists.us.dell.com -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
