I am going to upgrade my 5 years old PC to a brand new AMD Athlon X2 + nForce system. I am a Debian Etch user and going to stick with it. I am going to install Debian Etch on my new system, so I did lot of googling to find which architecture of the kernel is good for my new system. But, I am not satisfied with the results.

Now, my questions are:

1) I have 3 sets of Debian Etch i386 DVD. Can I use it on my 64 bit system? I would like to keep all the binaries in 32 bit except the kernel which is obviously will be 64 bit (available in i386 DVD).

2) If I have to install pure AMD64 Debian Etch, then I do not want to use 'chroot' environment to run 32 bit applications. I will rather install 32 bit libraries. Is this ok to run all the 32 bit applications (specially java, flash)?

3) In either way, does nVidia forceware work with integrated Geforce 6100 ?

4) Do I need to install any special driver for nForce mainboard to unlock all the features or linux has all the drivers bundled for nForce chipsets ?

Thanks in advance.

You can run 32 bit install on a 64bit system with no issues. If you install 64bit kernel I would use mostly 64bit apps. But you can have both 32bit and 64bit apps on 64bit distro install. It is mostly 2 different libriares. 32 bit under /lib and 64bit under /lib64.

For say java and flash you can run them as 32bit under 64bit if compiled as 32bit. I am guessing you are referring to use them under Firefox. If so have Firefox compiled as 32bit and then all plugins since they can only be compiled as 32 bit will work fine. But if you go 64bit Firefox then you need to use nspluginwrapper to get all plugins working which of course will be 32bit. The only one under 64bit Firefox that would not work is the Java plugin since it is a softlink instead of a hard file in ones plugins directory. There are two options. One can use Icedtea Java which has 64bit plugin or blackdown 1.42 java which can be runned under 64bit. Blackdown works better than Icedtea but is outdated though.

This is what I do. I have vmware installed with a 32bit linux guest on my 64bit linux host. From there I compile apps I need to have as 32bit. Then one can run the make install to place where needed. Or for me I place in rpm format. Removed most of the 32bit stuff from my system and use mostly 64bit. Mostly plugins, Java, SeaMonkey, Firefox and Thunderbird are the only 32bit apps. Now the next Java released is rumored to have a 64bit plugin. The beta I am using does not have it included yet. If it does I may go 64bit Firefox with nspluginwrapper and 64bit java plugin.

The nvidia forceware I know nothing about. Google should be able to help you out on that if no knows here.

Thank you Brian for your reply, I need some clarifications.

I want to install JDK 1.5 too besides java and flash plugin. I do not want to compile them from scratch. If I opt for pure AMD64 system I can install Gnash which will solve 64 bit flash plugin issue. But for Java, I do not want to use any alternative and prefer to stick with Sun JDK. Here I have a confusion. Can I use 32 bit Sun JDK packages available in debian repo with 64 bit system ?

Lets take this scenario. I choose 64 bit kernel during installation. But is it true that the binaries going to install are 32 bit because the source is i386 DVD ?

I prefer to have a system with 64 bit kernel and 32 bit binaries. Is it possible ? If yes then how ? Please explain.

Thank you once again Brian.

Excuse me for dropping in. I don't quite understand why you install a 64-bit kernel, but at the same time insist on having all binaries as 32-bit. Yes, I read the article on 'pure 64' and only heavily shuddered thereafter. I simply couldn't understand, what the benefits of such a contortionistic approach were. Too high for my simple mind all that stuff.
Well, 2 weeks ago I upgraded my hardware: completely new motherboard, a 64-bit CPU, new graphics-card and so on. I only kept my hard-disks and my DVD-writer. Of course I was aware beforehand, that my old Lenny-system wouldn't start anymore, so I downloaded and burnt a netinstall-64bit-CD.
Also freed a partition to install the new system to. And made a copy (--get-selections) of what I had as applications on my old system. Thanks "rickh" for that.
When the hardware was ready, I booted from that CD and let it install only a minimal system on that partition. Reboot. Then I fed that old selection-list to dselect and let it install whatever I had previously on the new partition. Surprise, surprise; let's say two-thirds came in as 64-bit, the others as 32-bit. A reboot again and almost everything worked - apart from my personal settings of course - as if it were my 'old' system. Only a very few Debian-applications were not happy, they wanted the ia32-libs also. Okay, download and now no problems anymore.
Then came the real tedious task: copying the files from the new partition to the old ones *without* obliterating all the settings-files of my old applications. 90% success, 10% I had to adjust manually again.
The few applications, that were previously compiled by myself as no Debian-equivalent existed, didn't want to start or gave ridiculous output, I had to compile again under the new environment and then they did what they were supposed to do. With one exception: XNetload. That depended on so old libraries/widgets that I didn't want to spend a lot of time to resolve them.
A very long intro, I know, sorry.
But now my conclusion to what I stated as a question at the very beginning. There's *absolutely* no need to differentiate between 32-bit and 64-bit applications. Just install them and use them whatever apt-get or preferably aptitude downloads, you won't get stuck anywhere.
Kernel 2.6.23-12, Debian-testing and let aptitude resolve all dependencies, as a basis.

Yes you can use 64bit kernel and have all 32bit libraires installed to compile with. If not wanting to compile then I am not sure of the Debian packages and the way they work. Only use to Redhat rpms. If there are 32bit deb files then as long as the requirements for the app are present then it should run fine. I see no issues with JDK either.

Brian

Thank you guyz for your reply.

I have upgraded my PC and installed Debian Etch 64 bit edition. Everything worked fine except my onboard sound. I googled a bit and found that nvidia uses intel driver (int8x0, hda-intel) to make it works. But surprisingly etch did not recognize my onboard audio chipsets. I tried loading those intel sound driver modules manually, but it didnt work. Then I came to know via google that the alsa version of Debian Etch which is 1.0.13 has no support for my onboard audio . I need at least 1.0.14 to get audio device working. Sure, I could compile it from source, but I dont like compiling at all, stopped it since I left Slackware. So, I upgraded Etch to Lenny, and I got it working.

But, I have moved to Ubuntu 7.10 from Debian. It is not any Ubuntu > Debian or Debian > Ubuntu matter. I am just sharing my experiance and opinion. What I did not like in Lenny is its unnecessary dependencies of packages. Take an example of 'synaptic' package. It has 'libthai' as one of its dependencies. Etch does not has this strange package dependency, but lenny and sid. Of course, this can be ignored as this package will not affect anything, but tell me why should I keep this unnecessary package in my system? same goes for 'Gnome-volume-manager' in lenny and sid. It has some command line cd/dvd writing tools like 'wodim' as its dependency, again why? Etch is cleaner and better, lenny and sid may be testing platforms for developers, but why these unnecessary dependencies?

Ubuntu is far more cleaner in comparison to lenny and sid. It does not has those kind of strange dependencies. This is the only reason I have shifted to Ubuntu.

Once again, thanks for answering my queries.