No problem at all. Just install Alien Bob's 32-bit Wine package.

If prefer to build from source, ./tools/wineinstall will detect the 32-bit compatibility libraries and automatically build the 32-bit version of Wine.

The way to build a version of Wine that can run both 32-bit and 64-bit binaries, which several posts have alluded to, is documented here. It involves building both a 32-bit and 64bit version of Wine and then setting them up to coexist:

http://wiki.winehq.org/Wine64

"This port is just beginning to work, but is not yet fully functional. Only people who are planning to fix the code will want to compile Wine like this."

Seems like outdated information. If they are saying that the current version of wine (64 bit) will run 32 and 64 bit software (of course, unless you run a truly 64 bit environment) then why would I need to build a 32 and 64 bit version that coexist?

Because that's how Wine can be made to run both 32-bit and 64-bit software. The information in that link (particularly the "Building a shared WoW64 setup" section) is consistent with the part of the announcement you quoted in post #12.

If you took the announcement as saying that Wine could be built to run both 64-bit and 32-bit binaries in any other way, then I'm sorry, but you took the announcement the wrong way.

"while 64-bit prefixes support both 32-bit and 64-bit applications."

How exactly was I supposed to take that?

EDIT: But yes I see in the configure file


--enable-win64 build a Win64 emulator on AMD64 (won't run Win32
binaries)

Looking back at the information in the wow64 section it looks pretty straight forward though. Presumably this would all be set up automatically in a distro that had no other option but to be multilib. Perhaps that lead to my misunderstanding of the claims.

The OS is mature it's the software devs and packagers that need to have a long hard look at themselves and actually produce real 64 bit applications and packages, not half/half stuff.

If Slackware64 does one thing it will be to give some people a serious kick up the pants.

Let me add a question: I tried Slackware 13.1 in 64 bit when it was released and had my pc crash everytime I started xserver with proprietary nvidia-driver installed. I found out, it was a bug in nvidia driver.
Is this fixed by now?

I just installed 13.1 64-bit, and installed the nvidia drivers, and there is no crash. I'm using the 256.35 drivers, may want to try them.

I had stability problems with my nvidia card and dual core processor. Take a look at this on Nvidia Linux forum

For greasemonkey do you mean this firefox addon:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748/
I have seen a number of youtube download addons. Are there any others that you would recommend?
Using flash and flashblock works pretty well though.

I use this userscript:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25105

Call me a purist if you will, but 64 bit is more of a pain than 32 bit still.
The big plus in 64 bit is when you look in the kernel. You lose all those bugfixes for dodgy chipsets which somebody might still run, so everyone compiles in, & a lot of the crap that went with the pc being an awful place. No need for drivers for video isa, eisa, vlb, & pci cards that aren't good enough to be given away in breakfast cereal boxes. You get k8 (or intel equiv.) optimisations, extra ram, and number crunching power, clever acpi stuff and a better environment for work.

WRONG WRONG WRONG
it's not just memory addressing it's 64bit data paths inside the CPU
and 64bit registers 64bit math logic unit
my machine runs 2 to 6 times faster with the 64bit system than it did with a 32bit system

Then I don't know what you did to your 32-bit system. Most software is not really written to take advantage of 64-bit processing (video encoders and that sort of thing excluded). The system may appear snappier but it's all anecdotal and I hardly noticed such an incredible leap as 2 to 6 *times* faster. If you have 4 GB of RAM or more then obviously a 64-bit system would be beneficial to take advantage of the added memory (thus allowing larger memory buffers/caches, improving load time and allowing multiple things to run concurrently without relying on much slower swap). If you have a 64-bit capable CPU with less than 4 GB of RAM I think it would be a hard sell to provide any definitive advantage of a 64-bit OS over a 32-bit one (especially given that there are many software packages that are available in 32-bit binaries only).

I am of course not saying that there are no advantages of a 64-bit system, and I run pure 64-bit Slackware64-13.0 (with 4 GB of RAM). However, an overall system speed increase of 2 to 6 times (do you realize just how much faster that is?) is ludicrous. Perhaps such a large speed increase in certain processes is more plausible (again, video encoding comes to mind), but not everything is math-intensive and will not benefit much (or at all) from 64 bits over 32.

Did that 32bit kernel have SMP support?

From my tests almost every program finishes faster by 1 sec or so on 64-bit compared to 32-bit. For multimedia apps, like ffmpeg, mencoder, etc. the benefits are significantly higher, as well as for memory intensive apps.