Fedora 14 is out.
This time I decided to give the 64 bit version a try. This is the first time I've ever installed a 64bit version of Linux, although perversely I've been using 64bit operating systems on HP-UX PA-RISC & Itanium for over a decade!
In the past I've never seen the benefit of going 64bit. I've only ever had 4 GB of RAM installed (32bit Linux with PAE handles this fine) and I've seen all the issues with driver compatibility, especially with Nvidia and the Adobe Flash plugin.
Installed fine on an off-the-shelf Acer desktop machine and on my Samsung R590 laptop. The Samsung needed the Broadcom binary drivers installed for WiFi, plus the Nvidia drivers, but is fairly straight forward.
The biggest headache was with Skype. In the end I installed the 32bit version of Skype and had to install all the 32bit compatibility libraries, so in effect I've got a load of 32bit libraries installed alongside the 64bit versions. Somewhat annoying.
The only things I'm missing are two plugins I use for Thunderbird: Lightning and Enigmail. The first is a real pain as I use Thunderbird to handle my work mail so I'm missing meeting invites sent from Outlook. Enigmail isn't a big loss.
Did I need the 64bit version? No, not really. I don't do any serious number crunching with these machines and neither exceed 4GB of RAM either. On the plus side, I'm seeing 64bit Fedora is robust and I'll probably go 64bit with any future installs, especially on my home server which does some serious number crunching work.
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