[sf-lug] use 32 or 64 bit on 64 bit capable hardware: Re: installing minimal debian and building on that

[Bobbie Sellers]

On 12/8/18 2:25 PM, Alex Kleider wrote:
> Thanks, Akkana.  I'm leaning more towards 64bit but will wait to hear 
> any further advice that might come in from Rick and/or Michael (or 
> anyone else for that matter.)  One of the many virtues of Linux as I 
> understand it is that it does work well on old hardware so mine must 
> be an issue faced by many.
> Cheers,
> Alex

     Alex looking at the specs and most likely 4 GiB is the size that 
someone decided
would be the least draw on the battery.   It appears that the investment 
in the
a couple of 4 GiB chips would not be wasted.
     I searched on Lenovo ThinkPad X301 memory expansion and found several
question about this in Lenovo forum.  I don't know which cpu chip you have
in this machine.  The only references I find indicate 64 bit bus width.

     If you actually have a 32 bit cpu you would want a distribution 
designed
for PAE access to the full 4 GiB.

>
> On 2018-12-08 13:56, Akkana Peck wrote:
>> Michael Paoli writes:
>>> Another factor to consider.
>>> For many/most distributions, support of 32 bit ("i386"), etc.
>>> is waning, or has already been dropped.
>>> Debian, however, supports more distributions than any other
>>> Linux distribution, so Debian may continue to support 32 bit
>>> "i386" for quite some while to come, but even given that,
>>> as things move more and more to 64 bit, 32 bit will become
>>> less well supported
>>
>> My machines are fairly low RAM (which isn't normally a problem for
>> me because I run mostly lightweight software), so I was doing fine
>> on 32-bit Debian ... but I was feeling more and more orphaned.
>> Nobody runs 32-bit, nobody tests it, and if you need help it's
>> hard to find anybody who's tried it recently.
>>
>> When I finally upgraded one of my machines to 64-bit Debian (the
>> stable version in both cases, though it was a while ago and might
>> have been Jessie rather than Stretch), my biggest surprise was that
>> the set of software was different. For instance, Python's built-in
>> libraries came in different versions, and some scripts that had been
>> working fine on 32-bit had to be updated for 64. Other scripts that
>> depended on PyGTK didn't work at all because PyGTK wasn't available
>> on 64-bit. The 32 to 64 upgrade was a much bigger change than I'd
>> been expecting and I was busy for a week or two getting everything
>> working again.
>>
>> I also discovered that some third-party binary packages support
>> 32-bit much better than 64. For Google Earth, Debian has a package
>> called "googleearth-package" that downloads Google Earth and
>> installs it. It was working for me under Debian 32, but I've never
>> managed to get it working under Debian 64 even with 32-bit
>> compatibility libraries installed. (It's probably possible if you
>> try hard enough; I just decided after fighting it for a few hours
>> that I didn't need Google's binary package that badly.)
>>
>> That sounds like an argument for going with 32-bit, but it's not;
>> my point is more that switching may be more difficult than you expect,
>> so if you can go with 64-bit from the beginning, it'll probably
>> save you some time in the long run and you won't waste time on
>> a poorly-supported orphan OS.
>>
>>         ...Akkana
>>
         Bobbie Sellers
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