Advice sought about 64-bit Fedora

[Jonathan Berry]

On 7/9/05, Phil Schaffner <P.R.Schaffner at ieee.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-07-09 at 14:47 -0500, Jonathan Berry wrote:
> > On 7/9/05, Anand Buddhdev <arb at anand.org> wrote:
> > > Hi fellow list users,
> > >
> > > I'm soon going to get an AMD64-based computer. I would like to use a
> > > 64-bit linux distro on it, but I'm not yet sure if that is the best
> > > thing to do. I am particularly concerned about firefox and plugins. I
> > > believe that in order to use the binary plugins like flash and java, I
> > > would have to use the i386 version of firefox, instead of the x86_64
> > > version.
> >
> > This is no problem.  You can easily run the 32-bit version of Firefox
> > instead of the 64-bit version.  Plugins will work just fine.  I've
> > done this on several version of Fedora.
> 
> Well, not quite no problem, but it works.  Can't recall all the gory
> details now, but it was a bit tricky getting rid of 32-bit Firefox and
> Mozilla without breaking other things.  IIRC, had to do some ugly stuff
> with rpm --force to get rid of 64-bit browsers, leave required 64-bit
> libs, and install 32-bit browsers to run 32-bit plugins such as
> Acroread.

Well, I've never had any problems with Firefox.  A simple "yum remove
firefox" usually does the trick (I think "rpm -e firefox" should do it
too).  I could see having more trouble with Mozilla because of all the
pieces to it and all the libraries associated with it.  That's why I
just leave it and use 32-bit Firefox.  That way I still have a 64-bit
browser if I just want one :).  I don't really think there is much
speed improvement to be gained with a 64-bit web browser.

Jonathan