Hello everyone,

I am planning to get my first 64bit system. I know slackware 11.0 works fine in a 64bit system. But, most or all linux applications were written for a 32bit system. Has anyone
experience any instability or crashes when using linux
programs in a 64bit system or do they work fine?

I appreciate any comments. Thanks

I'm not quite sure what you're trying to ask. Linux was ported to 64bit long before Microsoft. Linux is probably better designed for 64bit systems than any other OS that exists today.

You could always compile the program from source

Over all any 32bit app will run on 64bit systems. You can always recompile and on a 64bit system to improve some. One issue many have is things like Flash Player runned under Firefox will not work on 64bit compiled version of Firefox. The Player will only run as 32 bit and will not run within the Firefox enviroment. Not sure how to explain this but this is what I have run into in the past. Maybe there is a way around this to run a 64bit Firefox and still use 32bit players under it.

One idea I have is instead of using the plugin for flash 9 is for flash driven movies is maybe setup .swf as a helper and use the external player.

Brian

An AMD64 will run 32 bit programs. A linux distro might install 32 bit versions of some applications that either were not ported for 64 bits, or if popular plugins won't work. An example is firefox. SuSE for one will install the 32bit version of firefox so that flash plugins will work. This is even though they could instead install a 64 bit version. One reason that nearly all programs you can install for linux can be compiled for 64 bit, is that Linux was running on 64 bit architectures before the x86_64 appeared. Also, tools like autolib, automake and autoconf are used to produce software, so as soon as x86_64 support was added to the compiler and the libraries, it was just another of a long list of supported architectures that is supported.

Thank you all for your feedback.