title: Taking the Plunge in 64-bit Desktop Computing link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2007/05/06/taking-the-plunge-in-64-bit-desktop-computing/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 714 created: 2007/05/06 00:33:00 created_gmt: 2007/05/06 00:33:00 comment_status: open post_name: taking-the-plunge-in-64-bit-desktop-computing status: publish post_type: post

Taking the Plunge in 64-bit Desktop Computing

The 64-bit processor is the holy grail of desktop computing. This weekend I finally took the plunge and rebuilt my home workstation with CentOS 5 x86_64.

One thing I discovered right away was that a 64-bit OS on an Intel x86_64 processor does in fact run faster. Performance was perceptably better than with my previous 32-bit build using CentOS 4.4 for i386.

Then came the bad news. While the desktop systems using either AMD or Intel x86_64 chips have been out for a few years, there are still no web browser plugins available for Adobe Reader, Flash, Real Player or Sun Java on 64-bit Intel (Sun does have a 64-bit plugin for Solaris).

The programmers over at mozdev.org have come out with some wrapper code that allows you to run the 32-bit plugins for Adobe (Reader, Flash) and Real software in Firefox. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for Java. The alternative of using Blackdown’s 64-bit rebuild of the JRE 1.4.2 plugin works OK, although I did crash the browser on a couple of test sites and some Java animation didn’t work on others.

When I originally switched from a Windows to a Unix desktop, I had to learn new ways to do familiar things because much of the software I’d used on Windows was simply not available for Linux. In many cases I found that the open source software and the different procedures it required were more actually easier and more efficient than the proprietary product I’d left behind. There is indeed a difference between using a product like tetex and one like PageMaker for typesetting and page composition. After using it for half a decade, I have found the former more to my liking.

Now that I’ve made the switch to 64-bit processing, it’s likely I’ll find similar workarounds for things like reading PDF’s, rendering web page animation and playing multimedia files.

Update: I’ve found at least one purportedly 64-bit machine that I couldn’t install x86_64 CentOS (and therefore Red Hat) on. That’s the Dell GX620 I have on my desk at work. It’s an older Prescott with Hyperthreading (not dual core like the Smithfields I run at home). While the Intel specs say it should be able to run 64-bit OS’s, and it does install, once the config is complete it continually crashes.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo