Posts Tagged ‘64bit’

The other day I switched back to a 32bit Debian Lenny install on my main computer. The advantages to a 64bit system on a desktop are debatable, but rather minimal. The only real advantage and motivation to using 64bit was I had a system with 4 gigs of memory. However, some programs acquired from third party sources are not compiled for 64bit kernels, such as Mozilla’s Binaries for Firefox. With that said, where a 64bit OS really excels is with business grade servers.

Upon a fresh install of X, Debian defaults to the open source NV driver for nVidia graphics cards. Since I  used Kenshi Muto’s custom Lenny install iso I had the latest 2.6.30 kernel by default and had to do some tweaking to get the preparatory nVidia driver to work. First I had to download the following files from Sid:

linux-headers-2.6.30-1-amd64
linux-headers-2.6.30-1-common
linux-kbuild-2.6.30

If you are not using the 2.6.30 kernal simply type this:

apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Exit Xorg. Now that you have the headers and kbuild we want to create a symlink so that your system has no problems finding them; Then install the nvidia-glx and fetch the preparatory drive with wget (remember to make it executable):

cd /usr/src
sudo ln -s linux-headers-$(uname -r) linux
cd ~/
sudo apt-get nvidi-glx
wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/185.18.14/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-185.18.14-pkg2.run
sudo chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-185.18.14-pkg2.run
sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-185.18.14-pkg2.run

Allow the install script to download the necessary files. Once that is finished reboot your system and when you next start X you should see the nVidia logo briefly, indicating it worked.

[NOTE: in an incredible act of blunder I accidentally deleted the 64 bit package from my server. I no longer run a 64bit version of Linux; however, Swiftfox has a 64bit variation. Sadly, this is not the stock code for Firefox, but has some nice performance tweaks. I apologize for any inconvenience.

The new Firefox 3.5 stable dropped and I have spent the afternoon compiling it for my new Debian Lenny 64bit desktop. I fallowed the instructions from Mark Shroyer’s blog. In addition to his instruction I had to also install these packages;

sudo apt-get install libdbus-glib-1-dev libcairo2 libcairo2-dev libasound2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libnotify-dev.

I had some problems with not having access to bookmarks at first. I fixed this problem by running in terminal:

firefox -profilemanger

I removed the default user and created a new default user. Afterward I reloaded Firefox and it seemed to fix my problem. To get flash working I had to type in terminal:

wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.22.87.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz

tar -xvf libflashplayer-10.0.22.87.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz

cp libflashplyaer.so /usr/lib/firefox-3.5/plugins/

I deleted the tarball and the plugin flile from my home directory and continued to install the java plugin.

sudo apt-get sun-java6-plugin
sudo ln /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so /usr/lib/firefox-3.5/plugins/

I closed down any running instances of Firefox and then opened it again and Java and Flash worked. I have not had much time to explore what is new about Firefox yet, however I plan on tweaking Firefox to my liking soon, and will read reviews and release notes to see what new innovations I might like.