I’m fairly happy with my amd64 box, but it has some bothers. It reminds me of switching from 16bit to 32bit applications back in the day. Since the SATA drivers were busted on every distro I tried to install, I ended up with Debian Unstable — probably because I know how to dance around needing a more recent kernel.
Audio wasn’t working right away, but it looks like ALSA has resolved the issues finally. These fancy new 6-channel chips are silly. Maybe in 5 years I’ll actually have something other than stereo speakers on my computer. :)
Switching to 64bit has really shown me all the non-free software I use, since I can’t run these 32bit-compiles natively anymore:
- acroread
- various proprietary A/V codecs (DLLs via MPlayer)
- Flash plugin
- Wine
- OpenOffice.org
Okay, so Wine and OpenOffice.org don’t run because of porting issues, but still. There have been two ways to solve these problems:
- 32bit versions of various libraries
- chroot to a 32bit environment
Installing 32bit libs is nice, but Debian isn’t smart enough to let me install .i386.deb files along with my .amd64.deb files. There’s got to be a way, but I haven’t figured it out. So, I followed the Ubuntu instructions, and built a 32bit chroot environment. Any time I want to watch something in Flash, I run “bash32” and run Mozilla in there, which has the Flash plugin. Same for OOo, etc. With the mount bindings (e.g. “mount -o bind /home /chroot/sid/home”) it’s like I never left home. Audio even works. Pretty slick solution.
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.