[Tfug] 64Bit vs. 32Bit Debian

[Jeremy D Rogers]

I've been running 64 bit debian for a year and a half now on a thinkpad t60.
There's really not much difference. I wish now I had done more
benchmarking, but from what I can tell, it can be a tad slower on a
few applications, but can also be up to 20% faster for certain things.
There are sites out there with app specific benchmarks, but since I do
a lot of scientific computing, I figured it was well worth it. Watch
out for older benchmarks as the newer version of gcc have improved
amd64 performance quite a bit.

The only downside that I know of is javaplugin. flashplugin-nonfree
has been working well for a long time via a wrapper -- erm, that is to
say it works.. I do seem to crash FF from time to time, but that may
happen in 32bit as well. I don't really notice any packages that don't
work except for the java plugin. Java itself works fine, but if you
want java-plugin to work, you will have to use konqueror and tell
konqueror to use Java itself, or you will have to use one of the
opensource javaplugins which sometimes work ok, but sometimes render
things a little off. I only really miss the NOAA radar loop, but the
national loop works fine, and weather.com has a much spiffier flash
based radar loop.

I stopped using a 32 bit chroot quite some time ago when the
flashplugin started working.

Now as far as building packages, I don't do much, but I can't imagine
you would notice a difference if the source is ok.

HTH,
JDR

--
Jeremy D. Rogers, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Biomedical Engineering
Northwestern University



On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 9:53 AM, Charles R Kiss
<charles at kissbrothers.com> wrote:
> I'm concerned that I'll have to work really, really hard to get packages to
> build on Debian 64bit kernel.  Is it worth my time?
>
> Does anyone use a 64bit processor with Debian?  I read some of their site
> wrt chroot; I'd just like to know what others are doing in this regard.  The
> machines are cheap, but not enough to have one sitting around; I like to
> play a little, but my time is fairly limited.  Maybe I should just wait.
>
> Thanks,
> Charles
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tucson Free Unix Group - tfug at tfug.org
> Subscription Options:
> http://www.tfug.org/mailman/listinfo/tfug_tfug.org
>
>