[CentOS] Re: Firefox, Flash and Java on CentOS 4.1 x86-64

[karl at streetlampsoftware.com]

>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).

Unfortunately, telling them to get over it ain't anywhere near an option
here. If it was my office ... well, I've worked without flash for aeons
because I don't like it and I just don't visit sites that use it
exclusively. But this client of mine is a sales company and needs to visit
these sites.

I guess we'll work on it over the weekend to see if we can solve the
dependency nightmare and get it up and running. It's too bad we don't have
another 64-bit system hanging around to test on. Thanks!

-Karl Katzke