slackware64 + multilib or simply install 32-bit?
 

I've been thinking of trying Slackware64 when I upgrade to 13.0, but I need to use wine and according to their website, wine64 isn't quite ready yet. I'd have to compile and run 32-bit wine, but to do that I'd first need to convert to multilib. I've seen Alien's excellent wiki and am fairly confident I could get everything to work, but then I thought: why? Why jump extra hoops when I can just install 32-bit Slackware 13.0 and have things work out of the box?

I know about the memory addressing issues with 32-bit systems.. in the past I would just recompile for PAE and forget about it. Supposedly there is a small performance penalty there, but I don't know of any recent testing and there are so many changes between 12.2 and 13.0 that any perceived difference would be hard to attribute to just architecture. Is there any tangible benefit to running 64-bit and then going multilib, compared to just running 32-bit?

I have both multi-lib and KDE3-compatibilty installed. My personal feelings are that this is the cleanest and easiest way to run legacy programs. Yes I have the space to install two complete systems, yes I have the knowledge and capabilities to run an emulator or set up a chrooted environment, but I feel that this is overkill for wanting to run an occasional 32-bit or legacy program.

Alien Bob's instructions are perfect and the tools work great. I run Wine and Neverwinter Nights without great problems. The rest of my programs are 64bit.

samac