Ubuntu wins - Again!

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Wed, 2008-01-30 at 14:18 -0500, Nick Ali wrote:
> Its definitely good news. x64 have been available since the first
> Ubuntu release.

Indeed.  And the stability of it has been steadily improving.  Most of
the "barriers" to adopting the use of long mode on long mode-capable
CPUs under Ubuntu has to do with the lack of native 64-bit software.

It is entirely possible to use a 64-bit system with a 64-bit version of
Ubuntu and run 32-bit software even, though that takes a little bit of
work.  That work, however, is the same for all systems, which means that
an administrator for a large number of machines that depended on having
a few critical 32-bit applications has a few options available to them:

 1.  Re-package the 32-bit binaries for the 64-bit system.
 2.  Set up a shared 32-bit chroot and add 32-bit binaries into the
     user interface or the $PATH.
 3.  Create a local, customized distribution of Ubuntu that uses the
     64-bit kernel by default, but uses a 32-bit userland by default.
     In this way, only the applications which need to be 64-bit are
     included.

The only thing that I think Ubuntu is missing for 64-bit systems is the
ability to "change" back and forth between them at will.  OpenSolaris
seems to support x86 and x86-64 as if it were a single platform.  Either
64-bit or 32-bit software can be used on the machine, and the bootloader
(if not the kernel---I am still a bit unclear about how precisely the
thing works) selects early-on whether or not the 64-bit (long mode)
functionality exists and can be used.

I think that Linux distributions in general will probably find ways to
address this issue if the corporations out there do not start listening
to the music and open up their software.  One can only hope that the
open-source IcedTea project can be usable in production soon; and the
same can be said for GNU Gnash.  When both of those are available, the
world will be a much better place because we will truly be free to make
the choice of hardware platform for Ubuntu without fear that certain
binary-only software won't run on it.  :-)

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                   mike at trausch.us
home: 404-592-5746, 1                                 www.trausch.us
cell: 678-522-7934                       im: mike at trausch.us, jabber
Ubuntu Unofficial Backports Project:    http://backports.trausch.us/
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