Kubuntu Amd64

[Rod Joyce]

On Tuesday 24 July 2007 05:08:29 manchicken wrote:
> On Monday 23 July 2007 15:33:34 Neil Winchurst wrote:
> > I see that Feisty is available as a version for AMD64 bit. Has anyone
> > any experience with this please? Any advice gratefully received.
> >
> > Neil Winchurst
>
> I've been using amd64 builds of Kubuntu for some time now.  They work fine
> for me.  The only trouble you have is with non-free garbage, and that's
> easily worked out with the ia32-libs package.  I've got Firefox installed
> in both a 64 and 32-bit version, so I can run Flash and Java plugins for
> Firefox32. I've never used Acroread (with kpdf, I see no point in running
> such filth), so I can't speak to that.
>
> Wine may be tricky too, but once again I wouldn't know.
>
> If you're still a slave to proprietary software, you'll most likely have
> trouble with amd64 GNU/Linux of any flavor.  Most vendors of proprietary
> software do not accommodate amd64 users, and the lack of support there is
> not the fault of Kubuntu or any other Free Software project or
> distribution.
>
> I highly recommend amd64 Kubuntu.
>
So do I. This is the time I've installed Kubuntu, and I'm very impressed. it 
seems a pity to get a 64-bit machine only to run a 32-bit OS.
Strictly speaking, I have an Intel EMT system, but AFAIK there's not much 
difference for the purposes of this argument. It's the vendors' fault that 
there is so little support for 64-bit systems as yet. Meanwhile I use a 
combination of Konqueror, Firefox, Opera, Kaffeine-xine, and MPlayer.
The usual work-round for the problem with Flash is to install 32-bit Firefox 
instead of/alongside the 64-bit version. This worked on my system, but it 
took so long for the browser to respond to any click that it might just have 
well have frozen entirely.
So I installed Opera, from the zipped tar file as dpkg wouldn't install a 
32-bit application on a 64-bit system. Then I downloaded and insatlled Flash 
within Opera. It works well enough for me to watch the videos on Reuters.com.
On my system, RealPlayer works very badly with FireFox and Konqueror, and as a 
stand-alone application. It didn't work all that well when I had SuSE and 
Fedora, either. I use MPlayer as a Konqueror plugin for listening to Windows 
Media streams like the BBC - it works better than the Windows Media Player on 
my machine at work.
The Acrobat Reader is available as a Feisty 64-bit package from Medibuntu; 
apart from the message that PPKLite.api has failed to initialise on start-up 
it works fine. I prefer kpdf and Kghostview in any case.

Rod Joyce