Super Mini Review: Fedora 10 64-bit

My wife said since she isn’t using the Linux computer I built for her, that I could use it.  It has a Intel Core 2 Duo Dual Core chip, so I was pretty excited to try out 64-bit computing to see if there would be any problems.  I installed Fedora 10 since I’m used to that platform.  Installation process was pretty much the same as with 32-bit.  It took 20 minutes to install.  Blender was found in the repositories along with Inkscape - so far so good!

I was able to get the 64-bit Flash plugin and that worked fine.  I just had to look around a little extra hard to find the file on Adobe’s website.  At first I was worried that it was a tar.gz file and so it wouldn’t fit in well with the rpm system.  But, inside was just the plugin file.  All I had to do was:

cp /Download/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins

and it worked!  I bought and installed an nVidia graphics card and installed the latest driver and everything worked as it should.  It looks like everything I currently use my Linux computer for work just as well in 64-bit as in 32-bit.  As I understand things, I can run any programs like games in 32-bit mode if there isn’t a 64 bit version.  Once I finish moving to my new house I will transfer everything from Mario (my current Linux computer) to Super Mario (the new computer). Well, first I will reinstall it with a fresh install of Fedora 11 so I can start from a clean system.  Mario will then regain life as the guest computer so I don’t have to worry about guests mucking about with my settings or downloading malicious files.  So, if you have a Dual Core chip of the AMD or Intel variety and have been scared of going to 64-bit, it looks like things are mostly working fine.  Of course, your mileage may vary if you do more complex things.

• 64-Bit
• Fedora
• Fedora-10