32 or 64 bit Mandriva

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Shlomo,

On Fri, 20 Apr 2012 10:25:45 +0300
Shlomo Solomon <shlomo.solomon at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm about to upgrade my Mandriva 2010 to 2011 and want to decide if I should 
> go to 64 bit. 
> I know that years ago, when the first 64 bit versions came out there were alot 
> of problems (drivers, flash, Firefox ...). In any case, I never bothered to 
> check each time I updated and stayed with 32.
> Today, I Googled the problem and found conflicting opinions. Some say no 
> problems, others mention Firefox or video cards, and some even claim 32 is 
> faster than 64 because of smaller memory pointers. My guess is that the 
> pointer thing is really not significant, but I may be wrong.
> To be clear, this is a desktop machine, not used for development or 
> programing, so compilers, etc aren't relevant. I also don't have >4 Gb of 
> memory, so the memory addressing advantage of 64 bit is also not relevant.
> 
> Opinions are welcome (especially, not not only) from Mandriva users.
> 

A 64-bit installation of Mandriva worked fine for me on my x86-64 laptop, and
now I'm using Mageia Linux (its community fork) on it and on another x86-64
machine. You can configure the i586 sources in Mageia for getting access for
32-bit libraries, which are needed by some applications. As Gilboa notes,
x86-64 applications may even be faster than i586 ones (and it seems to be the
case from my experience).

I should note that Mandriva 2011.0 switched to rpm5 which caused me quite a few
problems which needed fixing (maybe it is better by now) and will not allow
you to upgrade to Mageia without a re-install (because Mageia is still
using rpm 4).

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish  

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