A question...

petrjanda · Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2004 1:32 pm Post subject: A question...

Before I buy Athlon 64 3200+, id like to know what percentage(roughly) of all programs in portage will compile 64bit mode?

LaNcom · Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2004 1:52 pm Post subject:

Hard to tell... I think most programs will compile (and - even better - work), but quite a few are masked or don't have an AMD64 keyword at all.
The stuff that won't compile usually relies on x86 assembler, like zsnes and such.

molander · Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2004 3:05 pm Post subject:

Major applications that emerged and work for me:

X
KDE (All major included apps, havent tried them all)
koffice
gnome (Dont use it normally but seems to work fine)
firefox
thunderbird
ut2004 (plays great, no problems)
tuxracer
jdk-1.5/ant
perl
xmms
MySQL
Postfix
Courier
Postgres

I have heard of instability problems with some apps but I really havent seen much yet. Maybe a crash or two a week with a web browser.

secondshadow · Guru Joined: 23 Jun 2003 Posts: 362

I've had a couple of hard-locks whielst running Kaboodle...nothing I can prove is Kaboodle's fault though. I'm going to do some more testing on it. Once I'm done being lazy I'll merge a real video player

Anywho, I agree with the comment made about most things working, just requires a little patience with editing some ebuilds.

lightvhawk0 · Guru Joined: 07 Nov 2003 Posts: 388

ursusarctos · Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2004 9:21 pm Post subject: amd

Outside of the beaten track (ie X, the major window managers, desktop environments, standard utilities, common applications), linux on amd64 is still something of a get-your-hands-dirty propositon. Most things can be made to work, however. A large number of packages are already written with portable code, and are just waiting to be marked compatible....take a look at bugs.gentoo.org and see the number of "please add ~amd64 to foox.y" reports. You'll probably learn to love running a ~amd64 system, though, if you want access to a lot of software.

Other programs require a bit more doing to get working....bugs, incompatibilities, etc. But the forums provide great help, and the developers are very active on the bugzilla site. I've quite literally seen packages go from "won't work" to "here's a workaround" to "here's a fix" within a few days. Of course, that's little consolation if you're in a situation where you need things working *right now*, but on the other hand it really feels good to know that you were instrumental in getting something working on the platform.

The 32 bit compatibility is something I've not played with all that much. To my understanding, you should be able to get just about anything working on a 64-bit system, under ia32 architecture emulation. But this lacks much (if any) support in portage. Different people have had success either compiling the old-fashioned way (sans portage, tweaking the makefiles by hand...) or adapting other distributions precompiled packages.

Nonetheless, the whole system is stable enough to get real work done, but it's fun and geeky to play around with when you feel like it....

petrjanda · Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2004 9:42 pm Post subject:

So while running in 64bit mode with 32bit emulation, the "only 32bit applications" will work under Gentoo? Is it better to run full 64bit or 64bit with 32bit emulation in Gentoo?

secondshadow · Guru Joined: 23 Jun 2003 Posts: 362

the "emulation" really is just a set of compatibility libraries...it really doesn't cause your system to do anything different other than allow 32-bit binaries to have access to 32-bit libs. There are also some apps that REQUIRE the 32-bit environment as they do not compile under 64-bit yet. OpenOffice is one such application.

petrjanda · Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2004 12:01 pm Post subject:

LaNcom · Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2004 3:43 pm Post subject:

Yes, you'll need the 32bit emul-libs for OpenOffice, and for MPlayer or Xine if you want to use win32 codecs (You need a 32bit MPlayer for that).
But 32bit apps run at native speed, side-by-side with 64bit apps without any problems.