Created by Terry Henderson on July 07, 2010, at 02:08 AM
My first 64bit system - very nice - a few bumps on the road but a very nice system in the end.
XCcube
AMD 64 3300+ (cpu family: 15)
Mem: 1G
Linux kernel: 2.6.33.4 x86_64 SMP
First problem was cups. No matter how many times I tried to configure and load drivers for the Brother HL-5170DN all it would do is print a mostly black test page. I found the patch / solution: cups-compat32-1.4.3-x86_64
Next issue was the 64bit version of Adobe Flash Plugin that worked sporadically and crashed often and found that pretty much the only reliable solution, (at this time), is 32bit firefox and 32bit flash-player-plugin.
So, it's multilib here I come...
I used instructions at http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/ but found a couple of details that could have been helpful but are just are not there, (at least not at the time of this writing).
Here are commands I used:
I first placed Slackware 13.1's 32bit packages from a/ ap/ d/ l/ n/ x/ in /home/ftp/pub/slackware-13.1/slackware (in their respective directories with this command):
mount -t iso9660 -o loop,ro slackware-13.1-install-dvd.iso /mnt/cdrom #(I wanted a 32bit DVD anyway so it was good excuse to go on and download it.)
cd /mnt/cdrom/slackware/
cp -ar a/ ap/ d/ l/ n/ x/ /home/ftp/pub/slackware-13.1/slackware/
cd /home/ftp/pub/slackware-13.1/slackware/
lftp -c "open http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/multilib/ ; mirror 13.1" && upgradepkg --reinstall --install-new 13.1/*.t?z
mkdir compat32/ ; cd compat32/
massconvert32.sh -i ../
installpkg *-compat32/*.t?z
We also need to separately install the “32-bit toolkit” (scripts that facilitate the creation of 32bit packages) compat32-tools-2.0-noarch-1alien.tgz
Awesome! Now I can install 32 or 64 bit applications and that's good because there are still a few applications that are 32bit only.
Here are a few examples:
Most Windows programs are still 32bit, and in order to run those on Linux with Wine, you need a 32bit version of Wine.
The popular virtual machine software. Although this is (partly) open source it still needs 32-bit compatibility libraries on 64-bit Slackware.
These programs are proprietary and closed-source. We have to depend on the developer to make 64bit binaries available. So far, that has not happened for these example programs.
Luckily, 64bit support is becoming more and more common. In the past year, Adobe released their Flash browser plugin in a 64bit version and Sun revealed a 64bit version of their Java browser plugin. This was one of the triggers to start working on Slackware64.
=====================================================
P.S. A little research on going multilib for Ubutntu64 Revealed:
- You will need to install package ia32-libs
- You will also need to manually download 32bit debs, extract them and put the .so in /usr/lib32 to satisfy lib needs.
But I just now found out about getlibs,("getlibs automatically solves dependencies for binaries")
See: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=474790
=====================================================
P.S.2. I should also add that if you do this to your Slackware64 system and intend to use slackpkg or some other such tool to do updates, you need to blacklist glibc and gcc.
And another thing, I now realize that when I first did the install and ran slackpkg which found no updates and it was the day before a whole batch of them came out http://slackware.com/security/list.php?l=slackware-security&y=2010 and as you see, one particular one was for cups, see: http://slackware.com/security/viewer.php?l=slackware-security&y=2010&m=slackware-security.402474 Boy, you really have to stay on top of that stuff. And I'm even on the mail list but just didn't notice. Oh well, live and learn. I have since found more detailed information on Slackware64-multilib on Alien Bob's wiki at: http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=slackware:multilib
=========================================
Adobe has re-written flashplugin for our 64 bit systems. I just went back to 64 bit firefox and flashplayerplugin
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/10/flashplayer_10_sa.tar.gz
su -m
vim /etc/slackpkg/blacklist #And remove line mozilla-firefox
slackpkg remove mozilla-firefox
slackpkg install mozilla-firefox
tar zxvf flashplayer_square_p2_64bit_linux_092710.tar.gz
mv libflashplayer.so /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/
Works great! :)
Back to Site Blogs
