What to install on an amd64 machine?

[Brian Chase]

One issue not yet mentioned in this thread is Java.  Java is painful to 
install, and instructions on the Java website are poor at best, 
confusing, switching between 32 bit instructions and 64-bit instructions.

Right now, I don't have Java installed.  I need a script that will take 
care of it all for me or just have it pre-installed out of the box.  
When will this happen?  I don't have time for this crapola.  It needs to 
just work!  Sure, I understand that licensing issues may prohibit 
inclusion of Java in Linux, but why then is it free?  Can't we all just 
put our heads together, throw the lawyers out of the room for an hour 
and fix this once and for all?

Flash for x86-64 is non-existent.

I haven't tried to replace my yum.conf file with the livna one, mainly 
because I'm afraid to get a bunch of unwanted 32 bit apps, another 
source of confusion.  Would be nice if all the good apps you could get 
off of livna could just be included in the official repositories.  I 
feel much of this "unofficial" business with some of the Fedora support 
pages is just justified paranoia of our sue-happy culture we have here 
in the USA.....Descending from my soap box....

Happy New Year to all!

Brian



Alexander Volovics wrote:

>In 2 weeks time I will be getting an amd64 machine and I have
>been reading up on possible problems.
>Because the answers to the questions I would like answered are
>contaminated with hardware/software issues when googling or reading
>mailing lists I hope to get some unequivocal answers here.
>
>- Can you install FC3-i386 on an amd64 machine without problems?
>  Can the FC3-i386 kernel and drivers handel the hardware without
>  problems?
>
>- Looking at the packages contained in FC3-x86_64 I see both i386
>  and x86_64 versions for a lot of things. For example:
>  hal-0.4.0-10.i386.rpm and hal-0.4.0-10.x86_64.rpm.
>  Are the i386 versions included for 'compat' reasons, so you can
>  run i386 apps under FC3-x86_64?
>  And are they installed by default when doing a standard workstation
>  install or do you add them if necessary?
>  If they are available for 'compat' reasons are they sufficient for
>  all i386 apps I would like to run or do you sometimes have to add
>  extra i386 libraries?
>  Can i386 libraries always coexist with x86_64 libraries without
>  problems?
>
>- Do up2date/yum function faultlessly when adding i386 apps to
>  a machine running FC3-x86_64.
>
>- If both FC3-i386 and FC3-x86_64 can run on an amd64 machine without
>  problems are there significant advantages for the x86_64 version?
>
>- I will be getting a MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum board with an Athlon64
>  3500+ socket 399 and an UDMA100 hard drive. Does anybody know of
>  any special problems when installing either FC3-i386 or FC3-x86_64?
>
>Alexander
>
>  
>