[Cialug] 64 bit difficulties?

[Nathan Stien]

On 7/27/07, Dave J. Hala Jr. <dave at 58ghz.net> wrote:
> Running the 64 bit version and downloading and installing 32 bit plugins
> doesn't work. To make it work, you'll need to  change the  firefox
> configuration file so that it runs in 32 bit mode in order to get stuff
> like mplayer and flash to work.  After discovering this, I installed the
> 32 bit version and everything just works. So, while you can make the 64
> bit version work, its much easier to just install the 32 bit version.

I run 64-bit Kubuntu Feisty on a couple AMD64 machines.  I use
nspluginwrapper [1] to run flashplayer in my 64-bit Firefox and
Konqueror.  (Oddly enough, I use Konqueror more and more because it
loads much faster and has some neat features built in.  One still
needs Firefox, though, since fancy things like Gmail don't quite work
right yet.)

[1]: http://gwenole.beauchesne.info/projects/nspluginwrapper/

As for setting up nspluginwrapper, you can find debs out there, or use
alien to convert the supplied rpm's.  At the time I was setting this
up, I just used alien, but I bet there are some apt repositories now.

It seems to work pretty well, but sometimes flashplayer gets hung at
100% CPU usage, leaving a grey box in my browser.  When that happens,
I have to kill the process manually, and then [sometimes] restart the
browser.  Since Konqueror can close out and reload very quickly
compared to Firefox, I tend to prefer it for my youtubes and such.

If your 64-bit distro offers a painless 32-bit Firefox setup, it might
be less of a hassle than nspluginwrapper.  Given my recent love of
Konqueror, though, I would probably have to run an entirely 32-bit KDE
environment in order to have a 32-bit Konqueror, and that would just
beg the question of running *anything* in 64-bit.  (True rationale: I
paid for those wide registers, I'm gonna use 'em, dagnabbit!)

In my non-existent free time, I would love to see if there's something
within nspluginwrapper that could be done to fix this hang issue.
Alas.   While we're adding to the wishlist, it would be dang nifty if
Debian really supported multiarch...

Otherwise, I have had no real 64-bit issues.  I have nvidia graphics
on each machine, and I just run the evil closed 64-bit binary drivers
from nvidia.  Works like a charm.  Wine doesn't do 64-bit yet, but I
can run kvm/qemu with full hardware virtualization, and it's
sufficiently speedy for my Microsofty needs.  And Wine never works
anyway.

Oh, while I'm at it: for kvm to work right, I had to put hpet=disable
in my /boot/grub/menu.lst, because something about kvm goes freaky
cuckoo bananas if you use HPET timing, which was default in my Kubuntu
on my hardware.  Could be made default by rebuilding my kernel, but
m'eh.

-- 
Nathan P. Stien
Consulting Engineer / Software Developer
Embedded Systems Electronics and Software
http://linkedin.com/in/nathanstien
Mobile: 309.241.2581