Xblog

The bottom line is that it seems like the whole 64-bit experience is still not that well supported by anyway, and those that tell you that you get perfect 32-bit emulation are… missing the point.

First of all, there are drivers. Gentoo had problems dealing with my IDE controller with x86-64, as did several other distributions. Ubuntu was the first one I found that did the right thing. The Linux experience is mostly there, but of course 64-bit browser means no 32-bit plugins, so flash doesn’t work so well (more a plus than anything else, although it is shocking sometimes finding sites whose most basic functionality seems to depend on flash doing things that HTML does just fine). I could use a 32-bit browser, but Ubuntu doesn’t seem to support that too well.

Finding a JVM that works well on 64-bit Linux is… tricky. Gcj does the trick fairly well, but it has the occasional problem. The Sun VM’s are available from Ubuntu in 32-bit form… only they don’t seem to work too well.

It turns out there aren’t a lot of Smalltalk VM’s for 64-bit Linux either. Niether Cincom nor Squeak have something ready made, although it looks like there has been some effort to address that on Squeak’s side. Either way, 32-bit VM’s seem likely to work just fine.

Windows is another story. It is clearly 64-bit in the OS only. Hardly anything is available for Vista in 64-bit, although you can launch a 64-bit IE (which promptly will be without plugins). That’s fine, so long as everything works well in 32-bit mode, which for the most part is absolutely true.

The main catch was in the driver space (where everything must be 64-bit). It seems like I’ve traded one set of problems for another. Before I had occasional problems with my nVidia drivers. The 64-bit ones seem to work quite well, but now my sound driver is a tad funky. Specifically, the driver doesn’t seem to recognize when I plug something in to the front panel. It does fine with the back panel, and Linux seems to be able to still work fine with the front panel. No idea what is going on there.

The killer one for Vista though is this road rally game that came with my video card. I got a fairly nice overclocked, passively cooled Gigabyte GeForce 7600GS and the game was bundled to presumably demonstrate just how cool the card is. Despite being a freebie, the game is heavily copy protected. The copy protection system works by… (wait for it..) installing a driver. Said driver is only available for 32-bit Windows systems. So, even though the game itself will run fine on 64-bit Windows systems (as a 32-bit program) and was basically given away, I can’t play the game because the copy protection system can’t verify that I haven’t copied it somehow. How insane is that?

I gotta say, nothing has motivated me to work on WINE more than this experience.