On Wed, 2005-08-10 at 22:05 -0500, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
You could run the 32-bit Firefox & 32-bit plugins, they are *supposed* to work seamlessly under the x86_64 OS. YMMV & all that. I have seen much talk about this on the SuSE AMD64 list, and this recommendation has floated out more than once.
On Thu, 2005-08-11 at 05:30 -0500, Johnny Hughes wrote:
Right ... the only option would be to remove the x86_64 firefox and install the i386 one ... but that might require MANY other i386 libraries. (I can't test it here). Tell them to get over it is another option :)
This is _exactly_ what I do.
I install Firefox i386 and many other components, including some of the Multimedia (like MPlayer) from the i386 pool. I ensure I _remove_ the x86_64 versions so YUM does not update them. This adds a few steps to auto-updating the i386 versions, but it's well worth it.
I'm going to start playing with SmartPM when I have time to see if it can handle it's advanced form of Pinning so I can automate updates without having to do anything special.
Of course, it would help if Red Hat shipped i386 packages for such Web components!
Should not be a huge performance issue ... at least I haven't noticed any earth shattering performance enhancements between the x86_64 and i386 distros when installed on x86_64 machines (that one could feel via the GUI screen).
AMD x86-64, as implemented in Athlon64/Opteron isn't so much about desktop performance differences. It's about the 1-4+GiB memory performance differences, I/O, etc... There are a few cases, especially if you optimize for the Athlon core's 3+3 ALU+FPU pipes, but other than that, it's really about the architecture and memory.