[Haifux] Running 32 bit applications (Firefox?) on 64 bit machines

[Eli Billauer]

Hi,


It has suddenly hit me, that there's no apparent reason to run most 
executables as 64 bits on a x86_64 machine. I mean, what for? It's not 
like I expect Firefox to address 1 GB of RAM. If it does, let it crash. 
On the other hand, plugins and other binaries for 64 bits is a headache. 
Flash player tops the list, I suppose.


So it really makes me wonder: Why are the preinstalled binaries on a 64 
bit machine, well, 64 bit executables? I run a 64 bit machine because I 
want the *overall* RAM to exceed 4 GB, but except for virtual machines, 
I don't expect any application to have problems with the 32 bit limitation.


Insights?


  Eli


P.S. Just changed my Firefox to 32 bits. Had to install some libraries 
manually to get Flash Player going: yum install libpk-gtk-module.so 
libcanberra-gtk-module.so libcurl.i686 (thanks goes to strace as usual).

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Web: http://www.billauer.co.il