New setup. 64-bit or not?
 

The plan: Dual-boot Windows 7 32-bit and Debian Squeeze 64-bit (bare/minimum). I will only have 2GB RAM.
The questions:
Will the 64-bit give me some advantages, or only problems with driver and software support?
Does that depend on my mobo?
Is it trivial to dual-boot 32-bit and 64-bit? (I.e. the Debian installer sets up Grub correctly for two 32-bits OS'es; I hope I don't have to do anything manually for the 32-bit and 64-bit.)
The answers:
(Fill in please :P )

I thought these were fairly obvious and trivial questions, but my google-fu fails, it seems. I haven't heard anybody complain about the drivers, so that is a good sign...

Hi!
A "normal" user does not realize a difference between 32 and 64 bit (I had tested more than a dozen distris).
-> No advantage (maybe if you would have more than 4 GB RAM).
Dual boot 32 bit / 64 bit would be no problem and no problem with Grub.
alfredo

If you've only have 2GB of RAM, I don't see any reason why you'd want a 64-bit system. You can, but I don't think you'll have any benefits. Additionally, there are still programs which will not run on pure 64-bit (without multilib support).

AFAIK, grub doesn't care if it loads a 32 or 64 bit system, I think.

HTH

Hi!
Because I installed many multiboot (mix: Windows, Linux 64 and 32 bit), I can say: no problem with Grub legacy or so called Grub2.
alfredo

Thanks. That confirms my suspicions. Somehow it seemed logical that 64-bit would have some advantages over 32-bit. I guess I could always go for a triple boot, if I ever feel like testing my little programming projects on 64-bit system, or some awesome 64-bit-only software comes along.

64bit does have benefits, but only when you're trying to address more than a total of 4GBs of RAM. For systems with less memory than that, there is no benefit AFAIK. It's mostly better in server situations with 4GB+ of RAM.