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One of the systems I'm running is an Athlon-64 with 64-bit Linux.  A lot of software is available compiled and packaged for 64-bit.  Anything that isn't already pre-packaged is a shot-in-the-dark.  Much of it isn't 64-bit clean (even some of the packaged software is not 64-bit clean), so it may experience weird failures or cause data corruption (GPass is an excellent example, it runs, but it destroys the password file and can't reload it without segfaulting)
Most of the programs I've had to compile fail to work.  Some have trouble compiling, because the 64-bit architecture isn't in the configuration scripts, sometimes they compile just fine, but they fail in strange ways while running, generally due to code that makes assumptions about the size of various variables.  It is possible to set up a 32-bit chroot "jail" in which to run 32-bit programs, but that's a pretty painful thing to do, so I've avoided it so far.  On Itanium, 32-bit is completely unavailable, so I'd stay away from that platform.  I don't have any experience with 64-bit SPARC except running Solaris, so no idea what Linux is like there.

==Joseph++


Don Calfa wrote:
> I'd like to try 64 bit computing but since it will cost money for me to
> personally try, it will be a choice I make as a primary platform.
> 
> I pretty much use most of the default apps that come with the major
> distros so I'm not worried about productivity.  The other application I
> use is Eclipse and that has a 64-bit version.
> 
> What if I wanted to run a 32-bit app?  How does that work? I think I'm
> OK in everything else but is anyone using a 64-bit system as a primary
> platform?
> 
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