12.04 LTS: 64-bit desktop by default?

[Stuart Langridge]

On 18/04/12 11:44, Oliver Grawert wrote:
> i might have just a brainfart (nothing of the below has ever been 
> tested i think and i have no idea if anything of it works at all), but 
> how about rolling a bi-arch DVD that boots into a 32bit kernel, has 
> some detection code and then kexecs into the real installer which has 
> the proper target arch...indeed this would mean to use up twice the 
> space (1.4G instead of 700M)
In theory it'd mean less than twice, since only binaries are different 
sizes; config files and pictures and documentation and python scripts 
and bash scripts and the like are arch-all, even if they're not actually 
separated into an arch-all package. However, creating such a combined 
DVD would almost certainly be more easily done by just putting the amd64 
and i386 squashfses both separately on the same disc (which would 
duplicate, for example, /etc/init/acpid.conf in each, of course). Might 
be a useful argument in the "should we have a DVD instead of a CD" 
fight, though; instead of primarily thinking of the DVD move as being 
about "add more packages" (and thus losing the discipline that the 
restricted CD size brings), think of it as being about "support more 
machines", so there is One True Ubuntu DVD regardless of which 
architecture you're on and there's not a choice between i386 and amd64, 
between different languages, and so on?

sil