First of all, I just want to say *again* how happy I am with CentOS. Across our boxes and our clients boxes, we're running it on more than 20 machines at the moment and it's by far the most painless OS to administer in detail that I've ever used. (Of course, I'm an old Slak hat, but ...) Thanks so much to the community and the maintainers.
We've recently run into a problem with a dual-opteron system that is running LTSP and serving up X and Firefox to a whole bunch of diskless clients. We're using the x86-64 build of CentOS, with the appropriate Firefox package. The client users have all been asking for Flash, since many websites are unusable without Flash these days ... but there's no 64-bit build of the Flash plugin. (Thanks, Macromedia! You suck!)
What's the best way to provide Flash (and maybe Java?) with Firefox on this server box? How big will the performance hit be from running non-64 bit packages? Any specific tips & hints?
Thanks!
-Karl Katzke
Karl S. Katzke wrote:
First of all, I just want to say *again* how happy I am with CentOS. Across our boxes and our clients boxes, we're running it on more than 20 machines at the moment and it's by far the most painless OS to administer in detail that I've ever used. (Of course, I'm an old Slak hat, but ...) Thanks so much to the community and the maintainers.
We've recently run into a problem with a dual-opteron system that is running LTSP and serving up X and Firefox to a whole bunch of diskless clients. We're using the x86-64 build of CentOS, with the appropriate Firefox package. The client users have all been asking for Flash, since many websites are unusable without Flash these days ... but there's no 64-bit build of the Flash plugin. (Thanks, Macromedia! You suck!)
What's the best way to provide Flash (and maybe Java?) with Firefox on this server box? How big will the performance hit be from running non-64 bit packages? Any specific tips & hints?
Thanks!
-Karl Katzke _______________________________________________
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 Wed, 2005-08-10 at 22:05 -0500, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
Karl S. Katzke wrote:
First of all, I just want to say *again* how happy I am with CentOS. Across our boxes and our clients boxes, we're running it on more than 20 machines at the moment and it's by far the most painless OS to administer in detail that I've ever used. (Of course, I'm an old Slak hat, but ...) Thanks so much to the community and the maintainers.
We've recently run into a problem with a dual-opteron system that is running LTSP and serving up X and Firefox to a whole bunch of diskless clients. We're using the x86-64 build of CentOS, with the appropriate Firefox package. The client users have all been asking for Flash, since many websites are unusable without Flash these days ... but there's no 64-bit build of the Flash plugin. (Thanks, Macromedia! You suck!)
What's the best way to provide Flash (and maybe Java?) with Firefox on this server box? How big will the performance hit be from running non-64 bit packages? Any specific tips & hints?
Thanks!
-Karl Katzke _______________________________________________
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.
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 :)
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).
Johnny Hughes wrote:
On Wed, 2005-08-10 at 22:05 -0500, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
Karl S. Katzke wrote:
First of all, I just want to say *again* how happy I am with CentOS. Across our boxes and our clients boxes, we're running it on more than 20 machines at the moment and it's by far the most painless OS to administer in detail that I've ever used. (Of course, I'm an old Slak hat, but ...) Thanks so much to the community and the maintainers.
We've recently run into a problem with a dual-opteron system that is running LTSP and serving up X and Firefox to a whole bunch of diskless clients. We're using the x86-64 build of CentOS, with the appropriate Firefox package. The client users have all been asking for Flash, since many websites are unusable without Flash these days ... but there's no 64-bit build of the Flash plugin. (Thanks, Macromedia! You suck!)
What's the best way to provide Flash (and maybe Java?) with Firefox on this server box? How big will the performance hit be from running non-64 bit packages? Any specific tips & hints?
Thanks!
-Karl Katzke _______________________________________________
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.
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 :)
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).
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
From the SuSE list, I don't think there are any performance issues. There *can* be problems getting all libraries correctly located (32-bit vs. 64-bit) ....
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.
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Bryan J. Smith -
Johnny Hughes -
Karl S. Katzke -
William A. Mahaffey III