Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

supersako · 2007-11-08 01:23:07

First of all, glad to finally be a part of the best linux forum of the best linux distribution. I have been using ArchLinux 32 bit on my desktop at home ever since I first tried it 6 months ago. I must say after using various other distributions it has to be the best one out there ( in my opinion ).

So now to my problem: I just got myself a Lenovo Thinkpad T61p, with 4GB of ram, 200GB HD, a 2.4 Core 2 Duo processor. Ofcourse Arch is going to be my main operating system on it, but I can't decide whether I want to run Arch64 or 32 bit.

Besides having Arch or Arch64 as the native os, I plan on installing the Vista that came with my laptop for "Free" (insert hidden M$ tax here) as a Virtualbox guest. I do use Adobe CS3 and Visual Studio 2005 once in a blue moon so I figure might as well have it on there. I've seen videos of the Compiz-Fusion 3D desktop, and would like to incorporate Vbox with compiz eventually and have a seamless virtualization of Vista. Also, I mostly use this laptop for web/software development. So all that being said.

Are the Arch64 repos as or almost as up to date compared to the Arch 32 bit?

Is it worth even messing with Arch64? I really dont mind tinkering, so can I do everything in Arch64 that I can do in Arch32 (sometimes with a bit of tinkering)?

Also, is the performance gain (for those of you that have used both 64 and i686) worth the hassle? Or should I just stick with 32bit for now? I found various posts that say it is possible to modify the kernel so that all 4GB are recognized on the 32bit. I plant on giving 2GB of the ram to the guest os on virtualbox. Please give me some advice I am torn between my two options.

OzMick · 2007-11-08 04:31:23

Repositories are great, I've had laptop and desktop both working fine. Only problems tend to be with things like Flash and Wine, video drivers are mostly a thing of the past. Speed wise, any benefit is going to depend on what you are actually doing, if you're a developer, you're not going to see much of a performance boost unless you're transcoding a LOT of video. But it is always there if you want it.

I think for argument, it is good to use 64 bit, even just to see if it installs and to add a voice to the crowd if everything works or something is broken. Even if you don't use it, you might be able to assist someone in getting some hardware working or program ported. Long story short, you can do everything in 64 bit, but it may take tinkering as you expected.

Eventually, every PC sold in the past x years will support 64 bit, Windows will cease support for 32 bit and the world in general will go pure 64 bit. Realistically, we're probably 5-10 years from that day though, so up to you whether you want to use it now or not. If you do make yourself heard though, you'll not only benefitting yourself but a lot more people as some of these lazy closed source applications developers might make a port if enough people are shown to be needing it.

If you're at all bothered with the legalities, virtualizing Vista Home is a breech of the EULA, if that is the version you got "free". Vista's EULA is what was the final nail for me, Microsoft isn't getting another chance on my computer.

But that is an entirely different topic, I think for a lot of reasons everything Microsoft (at least on PC) should be boycotted, there seems to be some very disturbing maneuvering going on with the company with Novell, .NET, OOXML and their "open source" offerings.

mivo · 2007-11-21 18:19:08

I've been thinking about this lately, too. I went with Arch64 when I migrated to Arch last week, and while I got everything I need to work now (Wine, 32-bit browser for native Java/Javaws, Skype), I wonder a little if it was the right choice. It took quite a bit of work, though I'm still very much a Linux newbie, so I had to read up extra stuff, but I also learned new things by doing so.

I look at this heap of lib32 packages I got from AUR and wonder how I will keep these properly up-to-date without having to check them manually on a weekly basis. Also the aforementioned packages need manual maintenance and they depend on the effort of the admirable people who maintain them. Some packages take longer to arrive for 64-bit (KTorrent is a current example) and generally the 32-bit support seems better.

My box has 3 GB, which is 1.5 GB more than I actually seem to need, and I probably won't ever upgrade the machine to have more than 4 GB where I would really benefit from 64-bit. I mostly use the computer for typical desktop stuff, including watching movies, playing music, getting text processing work done, mail, web, etc -- just the every day stuff, but nothing that's number-crunching-intensive. I rarely encode video and such where 64-bit would give me an edge.

So, I wonder if I made the right choice. Running Arch64 seems to require more effort and add some tiny bits of inconvenience, without any advantages. Well, actually, the last bit is speculation and based on hearsay. I only had the 64-bit box for a month now, and I never ran a 32-bit Linux on it, so I don't know if it is faster or if there would be no difference. Some people say that a 64-bit OS seems faster to them, but at least as many, if not more, people say that there is no difference at all.

Now that I have everything working, it's moot point, but when KDE4 is released and has matured a bit, I might just back up relevant data and do a reinstall. At that point I would have to decide between 32 and 64 bit again, and somehow 32-bit seems more convenient, unless I learn of advantages of 64-bit for what I do and what I have (less than 4 GB RAM). A lot of the info I found on the topic of performance increase is contradicting.

On the flipside it would just feel so wrong to run a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit machine. Kind of like drinking champagne out of a water glass.

Nihathrael · 2007-11-21 18:34:58

ganja_guru wrote:

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2007/10/16 … _the_ram/1

You might want to read this. I personally run 64bit, and the only problem i had so far is flash and folding@home. Both work now through a 32bit chroot. Actually you can check all those packages on AUR using yaourt(also on aur) and then running "yaourt -Syu --aur" That will give you a full system update, from pacman and aur.

As far as perfomance is concerned, i can not compare, so nothing to say from that point.

Anyway, you have 64bit hardware, and running 64bit software is the only thing making sense, if we ever want to get to the point where 64bit software becomes a standard.

Greetz!

FeatherMonkey · 2007-11-21 19:47:39

I'd add I've had no problems with flash using ndiswrapper java works fine in konqueror.

As its my default browser generally any way I've not tried solving it for FF so a chroot isn't always needed.

Find sometimes you can just add the 64bit flag into the pkgbuild fingers crossed a little prayer and it may just compile, just did it for vultureseye even though it didn't have the flag. Not yet encountered any problems think its your choice though. I generally find them transparent now a days you get the odd glitch but normally you can work around them.

As the above can't really comment on speed just a desktop here. But as so few apps are optimised for 64bit it doesn't surprise me, many apps are just compiled on 64bit not optimised for example like mplayer is optimised I believe.

mivo · 2007-11-21 20:10:32

Thanks guys, especially for the recommendation of yaourt. I installed and ran it, and it's just wonderful -- it addresses the "biggest" concern, having to manually maintain the libs from AUR. What a splendid utility!

The second browser is okay, actually. I needed Java Webstart anyway, and a couple of web sites I "have" to use require native Java plugins (not working with the alternatives or in Konqueror). There's are also a few sites that Konqueror does not handle well.

The 64-bit article was a good read, and I think I understand some basics better now.

A bit of a stupid question: Besides taking up extra space on the disk (which is no concern), are there any disadvantages to having the lib32-* libs installed in addition to their 64-bit counterparts? I don't think so, but wanted to be sure.

Basu · 2007-11-21 20:33:53

hey mivo, how did you get Skype to work on 64bit?

mivo · 2007-11-21 20:46:11

I used Zerial's bin32-skype package from AUR. It went really smooth.

Nihathrael · 2007-11-21 21:24:40

FeatherMonkey wrote:

Find sometimes you can just add the 64bit flag into the pkgbuild fingers crossed a little prayer and it may just compile, just did it for vultureseye even though it didn't have the flag. Not yet encountered any problems think its your choice though. I generally find them transparent now a days you get the odd glitch but normally you can work around them.

To be honest, i do that on any package that doesn't contain the flag and it ALWAYS worked up to now. The only exeption is Enemy Territory, but that's because you don't compile it, you rather install the x86 package. So no problems there

Leigh · 2007-11-22 11:47:11

When I made the switch to arch64 I couldn't really notice any significant speed difference or performance boost. As far as tinkering, I decided to use the 32 bit opera and firefox, java, flash, wine, (anything that doesn't seem to work well in 64bit) inside a chroot 32 bit environment. It works out really well for me and it seemed more practical keeping the 32 bit stuff totally seperate from the 64 bit system. Eventually I expect everything will work well in 64bit and I'll be able to just delete the 32 bit environment.

Overall, I don't find it any more difficult keeping arch 64 (and the 32 bit envirnment) up-to-date than when I was using arch32, and everything seems just as solid performance wise as when I was running arch32.

grizz · 2007-11-22 21:29:21

I'm doing this same.

Arch64 + 32bit chroot... practically only for flash

skottish · 2007-11-22 21:54:37

Basu wrote:

hey mivo, how did you get Skype to work on 64bit?

This is everything from Arch community that I have installed to run Skype, Lightscribe, and 4L (Lacie's Lightscribe front end):

lib32-alsa-lib 1.0.15-1
lib32-expat 2.0.1-1
lib32-fontconfig 2.4.2-1
lib32-freetype2 2.3.5-1
lib32-gcc-libs 4.2.2-2
lib32-glibc 2.7-7
lib32-libdrm 2.3.0-1
lib32-libgl 7.0.1-1
lib32-libice 1.0.4-1
lib32-libsm 1.0.3-1
lib32-libstdc++5 3.3.6-2
lib32-libx11 1.1.3-6
lib32-libxau 1.0.3-1
lib32-libxcb 1.1-1
lib32-libxcomposite 0.4.0-1
lib32-libxcursor 1.1.9-1
lib32-libxdamage 1.1.1-1.1
lib32-libxdmcp 1.0.2-1
lib32-libxext 1.0.3-1
lib32-libxfixes 4.0.3-1
lib32-libxi 1.1.3-1
lib32-libxinerama 1.0.2-1
lib32-libxrandr 1.2.2-1
lib32-libxrender 0.9.4-1
lib32-libxss 1.1.1-1
lib32-libxt 1.0.5-1
lib32-libxv 1.0.3-1
lib32-libxxf86vm 1.0.1-1
lib32-zlib 1.2.3-3

Last edited by skottish (2007-11-22 21:58:10)

imachine · 2007-11-23 13:56:14

I have arch64 too. Flash in konqueror works fine with lib32-konqueror-nsplugins, and nspluginwrapper-flash, alongside nspluginwrapper. the only disadvantage is that lib32-konqeror-nsplugins overwrites some files in default kde install, so every time you update/upgrade kdebase, or whatever package that provides it, you need to reinstall the lib32-konqueror-nsplugins package. no biggie tho. flash works and that's what's important.

You guys should remember that having arch64, packages compiled for 64-bit need only to be backwards compatible with as old as athlon amd64 cpus, unlike the i686 packages which need to carry the legacy code of Pentium2, even if you run them on a Pentium-M or a CoreDuo.

This would seem to bring some more optimization into the game, often neglected in articles on the internet.

Cheers!

skottish · 2007-11-23 16:55:12

imachine wrote:

Flash in konqueror works fine with lib32-konqueror-nsplugins

Flash runs in Konqueror with nspluginwrapper. You don't need the lib32-konqueror stuff.

imachine · 2007-11-24 19:19:20

Does it now? lib32-konqueror stuff did provide the nspluginview or so for searching for plugins, which had to be 32bit recently, perhaphs it's different now. would be neat.

;] will give it a go, but every time I update kdebase, which overwrites the nspluginview stuff from lib32-konqueror stuff, my flash stops working in konq, so maybe it's not all that spotless as you've mentioned.

cheers tho for the hints.

mclabaut · 2007-12-17 20:25:31

A downside of x86_64 is that it needs approximately twice the memory of i686...
For example, Firefox often hog more than 1Gb of memory whereas on i686 it is happy with only (sic) the half of it....!
So if you've only 1Gb of memory, I would tell you to choose a 32 bit arch (or use less memory greedy applications).

-mathieu

Noneus · 2007-12-17 23:04:08

Oh come on. I never use more than 1GB of RAM. It's always lower than 800MB. Ok if I do image stuff or some other memory heavy stuff I need more than 1GB. But that doesn't happen that often.

N30N · 2007-12-18 00:15:21

imachine wrote:

Does it now? lib32-konqueror stuff did provide the nspluginview or so for searching for plugins, which had to be 32bit recently, perhaphs it's different now. would be neat.

The lib32-konqueror-nsplugins package makes konqueror 64bit use the 32bit nspluginviewer and nspluginscan so it could run 32bit plug-ins with out the need for a wrapper (which gives better performance). The down side is the package needs to be reinstalled each time kde updates.

Alternatively (this is the only option for non Konqueror browsers) you can use the nspluginwrapper which since v0.9.91.5 works with Konqueror without the need the need of a patch and leaking memory and crashing is no longer a issue.

Ether way flash is not a issue when deciding whether to pick with Arch x86_64 or i686.

nebygemini · 2007-12-19 23:26:10

On 32bit Virtualbox is part of the community repository. A simple "pacman -S virtualbox-ose" installs virtualbox.
The virtualbox-ose package isnt available on 64bit arch. After some failed attempts to compile Virtualbox (modifing the PKGBUILD from AUR) I installed the "All distributions" AMD64 version from the virtualbox.org website.

Although virtualbox now works. I manually have to check for updates and its required to reinstall virtualbox after an kernel 2.6.*update.
So i recommend keeping the installer on your computer.

ganja_guru · 2007-12-20 03:40:36

mclabaut wrote:

A downside of x86_64 is that it needs approximately twice the memory of i686...
For example, Firefox often hog more than 1Gb of memory whereas on i686 it is happy with only (sic) the half of it....!
So if you've only 1Gb of memory, I would tell you to choose a 32 bit arch (or use less memory greedy applications).
-mathieu

I doubt this is true. Can you provide a link to where you read about this?

xd-0 · 2007-12-20 11:11:49

Almost the same setup with openbox 32 bit vs 64 bit. 32bit around 180mb ram, in 64bit 200ram. Double ram is not true. On the other hand some say that 32 bit binaries run faster then 64bit,
but I don't think thats true only in some cases.

I have one question if it not to much trouble (sorry for stealing the tread). Are there an difference in sourcecode when building binaries, or is it only the binary that are 32/64 bit?

augegr · 2007-12-20 12:55:44

In most cases, AFAIK the source is written for 32-bit. So we're not talking about 64-bit optimized source code, just a 64bit-support binary with few switches on the compiler.

Hell, the x86_64 is not true 64bit itself either, don't expect much from this extension.

zodmaner · 2007-12-21 14:24:22

mclabaut wrote:

A downside of x86_64 is that it needs approximately twice the memory of i686...
For example, Firefox often hog more than 1Gb of memory whereas on i686 it is happy with only (sic) the half of it....!
So if you've only 1Gb of memory, I would tell you to choose a 32 bit arch (or use less memory greedy applications).
-mathieu

That is simply exaggerate. On my Arch x86_64 system with 1GB of RAM, Firefox never uses more than 200 MB of memory and even that is a rarity. On most normal usage Firefox consumed around 80-120 MB of memory.

My Arch 64 bit is running comfortably with 1 GB of RAM, with no speed issues or memory problems what so ever. Without Compiz Fusion enable my GNOME desktop consumed around 250 MB of RAM (without any other applications like Firefox running) and around 350 MB with Compiz enable. So you see that there are still plenty of memory available.

Yes, x86_64 sometimes consumes more memory than i686 on some occasions, but not that much and will run just fine with 1 GB of RAM.

Last edited by zodmaner (2007-12-21 16:52:13)

Nihathrael · 2007-12-21 16:48:15

I'd like to second that. I'm also running x86_64 on 1GB ram and hardly ever use all of my ram. ( I run xmonad though and mostly cli programms )

skottish · 2007-12-21 18:01:27

If Firefox is taking 1GB of RAM, then each extension should be unloaded one by one to find out which one has the problem.

Arch Linux

#1 2007-11-08 01:23:07

Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#2 2007-11-08 04:31:23

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#3 2007-11-21 18:19:08

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#4 2007-11-21 18:34:58

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#5 2007-11-21 19:47:39

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#6 2007-11-21 20:10:32

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#7 2007-11-21 20:33:53

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#8 2007-11-21 20:46:11

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#9 2007-11-21 21:24:40

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#10 2007-11-22 11:47:11

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#11 2007-11-22 21:29:21

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#12 2007-11-22 21:54:37

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#13 2007-11-23 13:56:14

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#14 2007-11-23 16:55:12

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#15 2007-11-24 19:19:20

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#16 2007-12-17 20:25:31

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#17 2007-12-17 23:04:08

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#18 2007-12-18 00:15:21

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#19 2007-12-19 23:26:10

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#20 2007-12-20 03:40:36

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#21 2007-12-20 11:11:49

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#22 2007-12-20 12:55:44

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#23 2007-12-21 14:24:22

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#24 2007-12-21 16:48:15

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

#25 2007-12-21 18:01:27

Re: Arch64 or Arch 32bit? Which ones for me?

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