the corner office

Just a few more notes on the install experience. There have certainly been a few quirks, but it's not as bad as I thought it would be.

Browser and Mail

As I mentioned before, I went with the firefox-bin ebuild, which is a 32-bit binary. The 32-bit binary is needed to play nice with proprietary plug-ins, most notably Flash. I installed a natively-compiled version of Thunderbird, which hasn't given me any hassles.

Video players

Video players pose the same problem. A lot of the 'common' (Windows, Quicktome) codecs are only available as 32 bit binaries. These won't work with a 64-bit video player, so in addition to the normal gmplayer and gxine video players I use, I also installed mplayer-bin which is, again, a 32 bit pre-compiled binary which can play nice with the codecs. There are some open-source codecs for these formats, which can work with the natively compiled video players, but they're generally not up to date. So the modus operandi is to try to play video clips with gmplayer, then gxine, and then fall back to mplayer-bin. It's a bit of a schlep, especially because mplayer-bin is just a good old-fashioned command line app with no fancy control panel. I've seen talk of an ebuild floating around for a 'g'mplayer-bin which has the gnome trappings, but I haven't bothered to try it.

Incidentally, I've seen mention that Win XP 64 still has a 32-bit Windows Media Player, for the same reason that they haven't ported their codecs.

Eclipse

Being a good ole Java app basically, installed without a hitch. The Java plumbing is a bit of a pain to get going, though...

Java

Ain't so easy. The default JDK that apps like Eclipse want to pull down is the Blackdown JDK (version 1.4.2.something). I was happy to stick with 1.4 for now, for a number of reasons, so I have no idea what Java 5 is like, although reports are not entirely favourable. The nice thing about Blackdown is that it's open source, and compiles to 64 bit. The not-nice thing with Blackdown is that it was a bit slow, and not too stable. Slow... when trying to fire up Tomcat from within Eclipse, the entire desktop would lock up, mouse juddering etc. That ain't supposed to happen on a modern PC... What's more, Eclipse would crash every couple of hours. I've had no such hassles on Windows or Linux 32 Eclipse before.

The only other 64 bit JDK available is from IBM, and I eventually went and installed that. It's been a few days, and so far, so good. Much faster and perfectly stable. (The IBM download site has a bit of a daft setup, though, and each version of their JDK has the same file name, so you have to make sure that you're installing the 'unmasked' version and rename the file yourself, otherwise the files don't pass MD5 tests). Pfff, IBM, pfff. As I've said before, the proprietary JVMs still seem to be the only serious choice, imho.

Apparently, the 64 bit JDKs don't support the client-friendly hotspot compiler, which also affects performance. The alternative would be to manually install a 32 bit Java JDK and use that. To be honest though, the IBM JDK seems fast enough for my purposes.

Tomcat

No specific AMD 64 issues (other than a LOT of masked dependencies), but in the latest 5.0.x version of Tomcat, the Gentoo developers decided to unravel the file system layout to cater for multiple instances, and the Tomcat directory structures have changed just enough to confuse a lot of things. I think it makes great sense for servers, but for developers it's been a pain in the butt to adjust. Not only do you need some head-scratching to configure things like the Sysdeo Eclipse plug-in, but the default (safe) permissions are not intended for iterative development. The best thing to do is add your normal login to the Tomcat group and bulk-change the permissions on all Tomcat directories to allow group control.

MySQL

No hassles, but the GUI query browser, for example, won't compile on AMD64. I'm not sure whether grabbing the binaries from mysql.com and installing manually will work.

Wine

Works mostly! I'd heard that Wine doesn't play nice on AMD64. I thought I'd install it anyway, to see what happened. It installed cleanly. I pulled across my fake_windows directory from my old machine, and fired up Notes. It looked awful, with all sorts of icons blacked out and the cursor randomly disappearing. Turns out it was a bug with my version of X windows. I did an emerge sync a few days ago, and a new version fixed the problem. Since then, Wine and Notes seem OK (I'm typing this blog on the new PC), except for the occasional cursor-disappearing problem when hovering over certain icons and tabs. I can live with that, though. I'd stayed with an older version of Wine on my previous machine because of upgrade problems earlier this year. I'm now using Wine 20050725. I've heard that post-20050725 versions of Wine break Notes (again), so we'll see how long this lasts.