6.x from i386 to amd64

[Pete French]

> This doesn't tally with my experiences.  I've had an amd64 laptop

Me neither - but then I think this is a large case of 'your mileage
may vary', as it entirely depends on what you are doing. I did
find, like the original poster, that a number of language ports didn't
work properly when I first tried it - but they wenr't critical for me
so I jst found something else to play with. As a basic desktop system running
X, firefox and thunderbird it works fine. As a server ruunning samba and
apache it also works fine. but if you want to do slightly more obscure things
with it then you can come I cropper (I ran up against the libffi issue
too, and abandonned amd64 for about a year).

If the stuff you want to run works properly under amd64 then it's preferable
to i386 - but that depends on you knowing what you want to run. For a
general purpose desktop I have no idea what interesting tipbit I might come
across on the net and be curious about running so I stick with i386. For
production machines and servers when I know exactly what software I
am going to run forvever (more or less) then I am switching them all
over to amd4.

> (I'll also admit that I maintain some freeware software that is not
> 64-bit clean - but it started life on a PDP-11 and I've got more

So did BSD :-)

-pete.