[aklug] Re: 32 vs 64 bit

Greg Madden wrote:
> On Thursday 21 October 2010 16:16:42 James Tweet wrote:
>
>> I just got a laptop that has a 64-bit processor. On it I put the 64 bit
>> version of Ubuntu and I want some info on peoples experiences.
>>
>> Questions:
>> Are there any major differences between the 32 and 64 bit programs?
>> Are there any gotchas that I should look out for?
>> If I ran the 32-bit version of Ubuntu would it run slower, faster or the
>> same? If I run 32-bit software on the 64-bit OS will it effect performance?
>> Can I just recompile 32-bit code into 64-bit code?
>> Any other advice or observations?
>>
>> Thanks
>> James
>>
>
> Usually memory is the decision maker, > 3Gb you need 64 bit or the bigmem kernel.
> Ubuntu does suggest 32 bit for desktop usage, not sure why,
>
> I run 64 bit Debian Squeeze for the 8gb of memory I have, runs like a top. I
> mostly do office work, plus run vm's. All my apps are provided by Debian, with
> the exception of flash from adobe. I can't tell the difference between 64 and 32
> bigmen.
>
>
I've got 32bit ubuntu on my laptop and my artigo a2000 at home; and I've
got 64bit ubuntu on my workstation at work. The workstation has 8GB of
memory; the others have 3 and 2GB respectively.

64bit runs everything that my laptop does, but flash is a bit buggier -
sound cuts out every so often, and occasionally won't load at all [1].
That's pretty much it. Any other problems I have can be explained by
other stuff I've done with my workstation (OpenOffice crashes a lot on
my workstation at work, but that also might be related to encfs on my ~
and the encfs errors in dmesg.)

[1] I have a lot of firefox plugins too, among them being 'flashblock'
and 'downloadhelper' - so it might be related to those as well.

-- 
Adam
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