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

[Baruch Even]

At least in Debian you can install an x86 32 bit arch and later on install a
64 bit kernel to get what you want. All apps will be 32 bit but the kernel
will run in 64 bits. There are moves underfoot to make Debian multiarch
enabled and then you'll be able to run 32 bit and 64 bit apps on the same
machine and decide for yourself which subset should run on how many bits.

Baruch

On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 7:32 PM, Eli Billauer <eli at billauer.co.il> wrote:

> 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).
>
> --
> Web: http://www.billauer.co.il
>
> ______________________________**_________________
> Haifux mailing list
> Haifux at haifux.org
> http://hamakor.org.il/cgi-bin/**mailman/listinfo/haifux<http://hamakor.org.il/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haifux>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://haifux.org/pipermail/haifux/attachments/20110821/c407e574/attachment.html