Hello all,
I’m thinking of setting up a partition on my hard drive for the 64-bit version of openSUSE to have alongside a partition with the 32 bit version. My 64-bit version is going to be primarily for number crunching and development work.
Is anyone running a similar setup? I am curious to hear other’s experiences.
The 64-bit OS runs 32-bit applications just fine, provided you have any needed shared libraries. Most of the common libraries are available in both archs.
So are you saying that it doesn’t make sense to install both alongside each other?
If you use a separate /home partition and separate root partitions for each, you shouldn’t have a problem. (that way, you can use a common login and home directory, so long as the installed extras are the same…
I have found that on my 32 bit notebook install, scrolling with the mouse wheel in flash pages works, but doesn’t in the 64 bit version.
Also some 3rd party apps, like unetbootin, work better in 32 bit.
Never had a problem with other distros running on the same machine in 32 bit.
I suppose I should try myself and see if there’s a difference between suse versions on the same machine.
Well if had been in your place before the first install, I would have looked into installing 64-bit to start with. I have been running 64-bit for a few years and in general haven’t had major hassles, and the list of software that needs to be run using 32-bit compatibility shortens all the time, I think it’s just flashplayer at the moment, using flashplayer-plugin. It depends partly on your hardware, some proprietary drivers are only available in 32-bit.
Perhaps you can use the parallel install of 64-bit to evaluate it, with a view to going 64-bit some time in the future.
I think this is what I envisioned happening. I am a graduate student and have just gotten into doing serious numerical analysis, so I never needed 64 bit until now.