Arch Linux is moving ahead with preparing to deprecate i686 (x86 32-bit) support in their distribution.
Due to declining usage of Arch Linux i686, they will be phasing out official support for the architecture. Next month's ISO spin will be the last for offering a 32-bit Arch Linux install. Following that will be a nine month deprecation period where i686 packages will still see updates.
Any Soylentils still making major use of 32-bit x86? And any of you using Arch Linux? Distrowatch still lists Arch Linux as a top 10 distribution.
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Arch Linux Preparing To Deprecate i686 Support
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by Unixnut on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:05PM
I don't know, I have mixed feelings.
Arch was always a "bleeding edge" OS. Essentially Gentoo for those who didn't want to bother compiling everything and didn't know how to use the Gentoo binary package system. So it does not surprise me that they would be the first do something like this. They figure their user base are the kind of people who run tricked out top end machines with the latest hardware.
However Arch may also be used when you want a small light distro on older hardware, or on embedded x86 systems. Something that takes minimal resources. People like that may be out of luck, but they can be catered to by some other OS which will still have i686 support.
From what I see, the embedded space is moving very much towards ARM, and the server/desktop has pretty much transitioned to 64bit, so that only leaves legacy/old hardware as needing 32-bit, which can be satisfied with other distros (or if it ever gets too hard, roll your own distro or use one of the BSDs).
So perhaps for Arch this is the right answer, not for me though as I still have a lot of 32bit machinery around doing useful stuff (Via EPIA boards for example, one of which runs Arch), but I accept that I am probably not their most common user, and it is probably not worth the community effort to keep an entire 32bit build chain and testing/patching/dev structure for a dying architecture.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:38PM
After discovering docker containers available with an Alpine linux spin to them, touted as having better default security and being tiny in size as it's advantage, I took at a look at this distro, and found it very much to my liking. This is coming from a long time Gentoo user (16 years now) where Gentoo is my preferred distro when running on bare metal, because of the control over what is, or more what is not, installed (recently, looking at you systemd).
Because it's built on musl libc and busybox, when they say small, it really is a small distro. So unless you have applications which require a traditionally built userland, I think Alpine could easily fill the gap left by Arch in terms of supporting older hardware or hardware with limited resources. I've been migrating all my Ubuntu/CentOS VMs in my lab over to Alpine recently, because it lets me cram more VMs on the same hardware, especially in terms of hard disk usage. And there appears to be ARM variants of it too as a bonus.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:57PM
DSL, yellow dog, and Puppy Linux all come to mind. I don't expect them to drop any old architectures any time soon.
But, you've pretty much summarized my thoughts. Mixed feelings. I transitioned very early to 64 bit computing. I was impatient with progress every time I found it necessary to load 32 bit libraries. I purchased a Sledgehammer Opteron, and I wanted to use it as it was intended to be used.
On the other hand, I do have a bunch of old stuff lying around. I want it to keep on working until the electrons just can't flow through it anymore.
I suspect that I can do both, if I just research the distros a little.
A MAN Just Won a Gold Medal for Punching a Woman in the Face
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday January 26 2017, @05:24PM
DSL is on shaky ground. The site has undergone a few blackout periods in the past few years and the latest stable version is from 2008 and the latest preview from 2012.
Doesn't mean its useless, I use it a lot on older systems for backups and disk imaging using DD.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 27 2017, @01:15AM
Wow. Time passes, and maybe I'm getting out of touch. Doesn't seem that long ago that I installed DSL to see how the (then) new release to see how it ran.
A MAN Just Won a Gold Medal for Punching a Woman in the Face
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:09PM
Offhand, I can't think of any 32bit x86 processor systems that you would actually want to put an entire Linux distro on. Maybe just a kernel and a very small subset of standard and/or custom software for embedded environments but not a full blown OS with all the trimmings. How about you lot?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:39PM
There are millions of devices out there that match the description of the kind of computer that you cannot even imagine; believe it or not, for most of modern computing, people have run 32-bit x86 systems, and they are still capable of running anything that is worthy of being considered "an entire Linux distro".
Maybe your Linux distro wouldn't be such a bloated piece of junk, if the developers were more concerned with making sure it could run on such "ancient" machines.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:11PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Touché) by Knowledge Troll on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:24PM
I have a 5 watt embedded 32bit X86 machine with 2 gigs of RAM you insensitive clod.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Thursday January 26 2017, @05:37PM
Curious as to what system that is.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DECbot on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:43PM
I have two PCs with a VIA C7 Eden CPU. These are passively cooled and barely sip power. They work great for my home server needs--one file server and a second web/email server.
I am retiring the file server so I can take advantage of ZFS, I rather not retire the email/web server as that box works like a champ. I was also planing to use the old file server as a pfsense box. As more Linux distributions ditch i686, I think I will have to switch fully to BSD or one of the 'do everything from source' distributions like Gentoo or Slackware.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @04:19PM
Wow, that brought back memories. I remember the time my friend booted his computer and I hadn't heard of VIA yet, but staring back at me in the console was "VIA VIA VIA" where I had always seen "AuthenticAMD." Asked him about it, he had no idea, so I asked his father, who just laughed when we insinuated that he hacked the machine to get the message there.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 26 2017, @06:53PM
Wow, that's some proper old kit.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Friday January 27 2017, @06:49AM
Slackware is NOT a source distribution, though there are included tools and available repositories of source based packages (sbopkg and slackbuilds.com being the most well known in those categories). .t?z packages are binary packages and the system is installed from such packages, with some repositories also being available for non-included software (Alienbob's repo probably the most well known here, able to be access with slackpkg+ in a similar fashion to using apt-get).
I guess the point is, it's not nearly as time consuming as installing and keeping up to date an actual source based distribution such as Gentoo. Anyone who's ever compiled VLC from source will agree that perhaps it's better not to have to. Slackware got it's name because it IS designed for slackers. Just not corner cutters.
(Score: 1) by Triddle on Friday January 27 2017, @02:12AM
Perhaps, but my Acer netbook still runs pretty well, and given the size it is very convenient when I don't wish to cart my 64 bit notebook around. I'd also care a lot less if it was stolen or damaged.
Both run FreeBSD perfectly well, although only 32 bit on the netbook of course. If a Linux distro won't run on hardware like that then fine, but it doesn't mean that hardware has ceased to exist or be useful.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Monday January 30 2017, @04:11AM
Of course, it depends on what you're going to do with it. A P4 would probably not be a very good choice for something that runs 24/7, but if it's only going to see a couple hours a week of use the payback in power savings is going to be a very long time.
A P4 with 2-3GB of ram should have no problems running most version of Linux. It'll even run Windows 7 in an acceptable manner. Plus there's other 32-bit chips out there too, Pentium M/Core Solo/Core Duo, and they were still making 32-bit Atoms not too long ago (most of which are slower than a P4 anyway).
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:47PM
the oldest system I would tend to use would be a core2 duo or something of that age. that's 64bit for sure. I have a laptop that shipped with win7-32 on that c2duo but its still a proper 64bit machine.
still, its a shame to remove good code that COULD be useful, in a pinch. I wonder what makes them want to remove it. is it really getting in the way? perhaps just leave it as 'untested' but still leave the code in.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:07PM
just thought of a 32bit system I still care about: older atom fanless mini-itx boxes that make good firewalls or audio playback/headless systems.
voyage linux used to be a good choice but it looks like its been a long time since it had updates.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 26 2017, @06:52PM
Well, as near as I can tell, it's because Arch is/wants to be a desktop distro and they don't really make 32bit desktop processors for quite some time now.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:57PM
Agree with you, only without the limitation to 32 bit processors, that's true of anything. The only reason to install 'the entire distro' is because you have more storage than you know how what to do with and you're short of time.
Also I do have 32bit x86 hardware still running and doing its job admirably. An EeePC, running customized Slackware not Arch though.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:15PM
Not really, I've tried installing a 32bit browser along with all the stuff that goes along with it along side a 64bit browser in order to get software that was poorly programmed to work. Having a separate 32bit install is just a lot easier than trying to figure out how to get those components to play nice with each other.
Plus, this is the 21st century, the 20gb you need for that, is usually not hard to come by unless you're dealing with a tiny SSD or ancient disk that's probably going to fail soon anyways. Even my laptop from 5 years ago had over 300gb of space on it.
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Thursday January 26 2017, @01:33PM
From memory I've think I've still got some legacy toolchain things (& bespoke tools from vendors) for embedded system cross compiles that are 32 bit only and would be impossible and/or a royal PITA to try and rebuild or run on a 64/multilib system, but you still want a decent host development environment to use them.
Of course there's VirtualBox, and the older install iso images aren't going anywhere, so just running legacy tools inside a 32 bit VM on the older distro means this isn't a problem provided ssh & X-remoting continues to work.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:07PM
Is the old VMware tool still available? Plug in a running system, and the virtualization tool would move it from hardware into a virtual machine. Or, if the hardware wasn't running, it would make a copy of the hard disk, then fire it up for the move. Or, that's how I remember it working, anyway.
Ahhhh, we have something here - https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1018406 [vmware.com] Looks like names have changed (presumably to protect the guilty) but the end goal is the same. Migrate hardware OS's to VM's.
A MAN Just Won a Gold Medal for Punching a Woman in the Face
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 26 2017, @06:55PM
Fair nuff. That only means you need those specific 32bit libs though, rather than an entire 32bit system.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:12PM
The issue isn't the processor so much as the software.
TFA and TFS are somewhat unclear about whether this is all 32-bit versions or just the ones that are for i686 based processors. I don't run Arch, but I do regularly use 32bit Linux as Cisco refuses to release a version of Webex that works with 64bit Linux. It works, but you don't get sound and I haven't found anything that allows it to work that doesn't ultimately get back to 32-bit software.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 26 2017, @06:56PM
Same thing when you're talking about Arch. For 32bit code they only had the 686 version.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday January 26 2017, @09:54PM
Until earlier this year, I ran a development and database server that provides the backend data acquisition for a live website [thelotterystation.com] on an older 32-bit Pentium-4* based HP server. The machine ran i386 Debian stable (Jessie) [debian.org] and hosted all the scripts that pull the live data from the site's data providers, send email updates to subscribers, and update the database on the live site.
About a month ago, I migrated the server to an ARM-based Olinuxino about the size of a pack of playing cards (now Debian stable/armhf [debian.org]), wiped the old 40GB hard drive, and turned in the HP server to a waste management company for recycling. This process was, amazingly to me, relatively trouble-free, with no drop in data provision and no subscriber e-mails missed (though one round of emails was late by more than a day due to a misconfigured cron job not finding executables in its path--sorry about that, my fault).
For reliability, I underclocked the ARM board a little. It's been running rock-solid stable, a nice surprise. My key takeaway lesson: The Allwinner A20 ARM processor is very, very slow when compared to any modern x86--or even when compared to that old Pentium 4--well-suited to this particular job but probably not for a busy live server.
(*Although the Pentium 4 processors were Intel's first with AMD64 architecture, the earliest P4s were 32-bit only, and this was such a one.)
(Score: 2) by dry on Friday January 27 2017, @04:44AM
Have to consider memory as well. 64bit really should have 4GBs+ while this C2D that I'm using with 2GBs of memory, with old memory not cheap like new memory.
I also use a T42 occasionally, 1.6Ghz Pentium M (basically a single core C2D) with only a GB of memory which doesn't even support 64bit but is plenty fast enough for light use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @07:49AM
I tend to use my hottest hardware for desktops (should be obvious) and older/slower stuff for servers, meaning, 32 bit hw.
I admin for a small hosting company and the servers are all older 32-bit hardware, most are dual P-III (yes) and they're quite fast. (Maybe I'm that good? I've always been a hotrodder- emphasis on efficiency.)
Someone else commented about how newer hardware is more efficient per watt. That's a tricky thing to say in a broad way. They may do well at full speed, but those newer processors are using way more power when doing nothing, compared to the older P-III that really doesn't need a fan- I've tried- they stay cool. (No, I do not have any P-III desktop machines.)
I have a few 64 bit capable systems, but I have no 64 bit OSes running. I've messed around with some for kicks, but I don't get what the big deal is. If you're running SolidWorks or such, OK, but for most casual desktop work? If I put a 64 bit OS on a machine, will it run faster or better than the 32 bit equivalent?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @12:34PM
You really know when the developers are no longer using setups like your own; things break all the time.
It became very apparent when the kernel developers all moved to multi-core x86-64; all the single-core, 32-bit pathways started breaking regularly in new builds.
As for Arch, it's always been helmed by snobbish know-it-all tyrants, who are perfectly comfortable running roughshod over those who are not members of the recognized elite.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @01:13PM
Me too, on an EeePC. Haven't found a replacement for it, there are basically no 10" laptops anymore, and the 11" ones are horribly expensive, ultra-thin with hardly any connectors, and most of them have mirrors where the screen should be (which also disqualifies all the tablets/convertibles which are at least cheaper - though all more expensive than the EeePC was).
Basically unless you NEED more CPU power, all modern laptops offer is less for a much higher price. And I really could use something a little more modern...
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday January 26 2017, @04:11PM
Me too, on an EeePC. Haven't found a replacement for it, there are basically no 10" laptops anymore
I've expressed similar sentiments over on the green site. A couple anonymous contributors replied, pointing out a few inexpensive 10.1" or smaller computers running Windows 10 for sale on Walmart's web shop: the RCA Cambrio [walmart.com] and Nextbook Flexx [walmart.com] detachables and Epik ELL [walmart.com] laptop. I haven't investigated these particular models for screen finish or compatibility with GNU/Linux on bare metal, though you could run Windows on bare metal and use Vagrant and Xming to run GNU/Linux applications.
Others appear to be settling for either an 11" or a Crouton'd Chromebook [soylentnews.org].
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @08:22PM
Those first ones are all convertibles, i.e. tablets with a keyboard.
The problem with tablets is
- touchscreen, thus glaring
- tiny SSD, SOLDERED IN (though admittedly a bit larger than what my netbook has, but then that netbook has a SD slot), RAM soldered in (and 1/4 of what I have in my netbook, that is NOT an upgrade)
- few to no connectors (usually, you are lucky to get 2 USB ports, 0 ethernet etc. etc.)
So exactly what I said: a SOLID downgrade compared to the 10 year old netbook.
The Acer Aspire One C/D that gets thrown around are only sold used, and for fairly high prices (for used, 6 year old computers at least).
Anything I've looked at below $600 was "I don't think I'd have a use for it for free", and even most of the > $1000 get at best a "well, at least the CPU got faster" grade.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:03PM
Got also some x86 still in use:
* VIA Epia 2 small personal server, mostly for email
* AMD Duron 750MHz, as living room sound system and wireless AP
* Intel Atom netbook, travel (development) laptop
All run Gentoo Linux.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:13PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:39PM
To save a few extra dollars per year is no compelling reason to rebuild a working system, especially when there is sentimental value in keeping the old one running.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:00PM
Yeah, basically that... it works and I hardly throw hardware away. Electricity costs are hardly an issue.
(Score: 3, Funny) by q.kontinuum on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:08PM
the AMD Duron is a lot slower than a Raspberry Pi 3
The Duron is the sound system! You don't want to replace good old tubes with modern transistor technique! [theaudioarchive.com], no matter how slow the Duron is. Also, with the higher power consumption it does provide this warm (nostalgic) feeling.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday January 26 2017, @04:59PM
Anything modern will also be back-doored, so there is that.
Not sure if the RPI 3 is "small" enough to avoid that.
I decided years ago the way to avoid treacherous hardware was to go big (Servers), or go small (embedded), since the consumer space was thoroughly sabotaged with DRM.
(Score: 4, Informative) by urza9814 on Thursday January 26 2017, @09:32PM
I just do not understand this argument.
I recently started building out my home network. Two old laptops running virtual servers, a new pfsense hardware firewall, some pis and webcams and an extra switch and a dozen fans and other support hardware. As far as I can tell, my power bill hasn't increased a dime -- any change is lost in the noise. I measured it with a Kill-A-Watt and the entire cabinet combined uses about the same amount of power as a single floor lamp.
My parents have a lightbulb in the basement that they never turn off, because it's a pull switch way in the back and there's no other light, so once it's out you need a flashlight to find it and turn it back on. That single bulb wastes more power than ALL of my old hardware.
For a corporation running a massive datacenter, power consumption matters. For a home user, compared to your fridge or AC or whatever else a couple extra computers are practically nothing. So unless I need the horsepower, why spend hundreds to replace them with newer hardware?
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday January 27 2017, @10:16AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday January 27 2017, @04:10PM
Depends on what kind of x86 system you're talking about. Obviously if you're running some massive gaming desktop with an 800W power supply it's gonna drain a lot of power. But on the other end of the spectrum, headless laptops tend to be pretty efficient -- you can easily get them below 10W. And I'd need more than one pi to replace each laptop -- if I even can at all. I run YaCY as one of four virtual servers on my eight year old laptop, but last time I tried YaCY alone on a Pi it locked up the whole system every couple hours. I'm sure if I tweaked the settings enough I could make it work, but it certainly won't work as well.
Meanwhile, each Pi I add is around $50-$80 by the time you add power adapters, SD card, networking cables, etc. I'd need several of those, so we're talking about a couple hundred bucks, and I'd probably need to buy a new network switch too, because I'm out of ports and I'm probably not going to be able to replace my two laptops with only two Pis...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:36PM
Ditto. All my 4 machines are AthlonXP 2400/2600+ including a laptop.
VLC plays ripped 720p content perfectly fine in my AthlonXP 2400+. ~120W with two 2TB HD and 24" FullHD monitor.
And with Palemoon and just using Ublock Origin and NoScript can browse WAY faster than many modern laptops people brags about but don't bother to "upgrade".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:36PM
> As for Arch, it's always been helmed by snobbish know-it-all tyrants, who are perfectly comfortable running roughshod over those who are not members of the recognized elite
That's what I learned when Arch switched to systemd some years ago. The move was a huge pain to accomplish with their rolling update system, involving more than a dozen complicated commands to enter at a console. Towards the end, it went wrong somehow and left me with a broken system. Maybe I mistyped a command, or maybe their commands didn't account for some feature of my setup. Commented about the matter on the Arch forums, that maybe they shouldn't have rushed to switch to systemd so fast, and received attitude from one of the Arch maintainers. That was when I abandoned Arch. Installed Lubuntu (I usually turn to an Ubuntu distro when I want one quick) and haven't touched Arch since.
I've tried lots of distros. Someone says Arch is for Gentoo wannabes who don't want to do lots of compiling. Well, I've tried Gentoo. With roughly 1000 packages installed, and packages being updated on average perhaps 4 times a year, that's a bit more than 10 updates per day, all of which must be compiled. A big one, like an update to X, took hours to do. The worst was an update to gcc. Compile new gcc with old gcc, then compile new gcc again, with new gcc. Then, recompile EVERYTHING with new gcc.
These days, I'm not as interested in experimenting with the system. I just want a stable distro that takes minimal effort to maintain, don't want to spend lots of time being my own sysadm any more, rather focus on other work.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:44PM
Is that the optimisation they call "loop unrolling"?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:59PM
That reminds me of a Slashdot comment I read in my youth: Some guy said that he was a long-time Linux user who switched to the Macintosh because he was tired of tinkering and wanted a system that Just Works; at the time, I thought "Well, to each his own, but I love tinkering, and I cannot imagine enjoying a system that doesn't offer such control!"
Well, my relationship to tinkering has grown cold over the years, and now we're just uncomfortable bedfellows.
I think this explains the falling out: In my youthful exuberance, I felt my tinkering led me to an ever more perfect creation; yet, what I've found over the years is that the shifting sands of technology and "community" interests means that all of one's carefully crafted work eventually becomes a stagnant, incompatible wasteland. If one doesn't submit to the Tyranny of the Majority, then one is forced to become an old codger, yelling at those short-sighted, sycophantic, disgustingly exuberant youths to get off your command line! Just leave me and my programs alone, you uncouth, ill-bred scalawags!
I mean, if you're going to acquiesce to the unwashed masses, you might as well be getting some customer service (e.g., from a company that is paid to construct your computing system, like Apple).
So, to that "old" man on Slashdot: I get it now. Life is short; use a system that eases the suffering.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Thursday January 26 2017, @09:23PM
Mate on Xubuntu 12.04?
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Interesting) by engblom on Thursday January 26 2017, @01:08PM
I guess this will annoy some Arch users. To fully remove 32-bit support sounds bad. For those needing to run Wine, how will this work out? Or those needing Skype? Or anyone needing to run any other program with dependencies on 32-bit libraries.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @01:25PM
The multilib support stays (that is all the lib32-packages that provide 32bit libraries ready to run on a 64bit base system).
32bit intel packages are also not entirely out of the question: If volunteers step up and take the burden, the packages will stick around -- a bit outside of the official builds, but still very visible in Arch-Land. If nobody can be bothered to step up and take over building and testing the 32bit packages, then they deserve to die:-)
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @03:01PM
32bit intel packages are also not entirely out of the question: If volunteers step up and take the burden, the packages will stick around
I wouldn't be so sure.
When Arch announced the switch to systemd, they said the same thing about volunteers stepping up and take over maintaining sysvinit. They then spent the next two weeks banning anyone who tried to volunteer from the Arch forums.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Thursday January 26 2017, @04:42PM
I too am married to Wine and Skype for various reasons, one of them being that my clients prefer Skype over IRC because Skype is automatically logged durably and IRC is not. And Ubuntu is also sunsetting 32-bit support; by 18.10 [ubuntu.com], its repository won't even include the libraries to run 32-bit applications.
For Skype, use the web client. Or, equivalently, use the 64-bit alpha version that embeds Chromium and uses half a gigabyte of RAM. Or you could convince your contacts to stop using a proprietary chat application with a proprietary protocol in favor of a chat application supported by at least one free client. The ideal recommendation would depend on your use case for Skype: is it text, text with durable logs, audio, or video?
For Wine, here are a couple things to try that I myself haven't tried: One is to run a different 32-bit Linux distribution in a container and use your 64-bit X server on the outer machine to view the container. Another is to ask your application's publisher for a 64-bit build of the application and run it in 64-bit Wine.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @01:12PM
Linux x 4.8.13-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Dec 9 07:43:17 CET 2016 i686 GNU/Linux
(Score: 1) by loic on Thursday January 26 2017, @01:17PM
I still use x86, for low memory VMs. As by construction, x64 uses some more memory, it is always neat to have a choice.
My home dev rig uses Manjaro, an Arch derivative and is x64.
Arch is not exactly your average server distro and probably do not have extensive resources to package and test, that makes definitively sense. But for the few users of old hardware, which may make quite a part of Arch community, it probably sucks hard.
(Score: 5, Informative) by ledow on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:01PM
32-bit is dying on the desktop.
Moan all you like, but it's on the way out.
Games are stopping supporting it. OS are stopping supporting it. Everything is 64-bit by default and works just the same. Hardware that doesn't have 64-bit drivers nowadays is dead in the water.
32-bit will be consigned to embedded and specialist environments, and is already headed that way.
If you buy a new computer, install a 64-bit OS. Run your 32-bit stuff virtualised if you have to, but a 32-bit OS or application set is not going to last you long enough to suffer the hassle of installing it.
It's sad, but unfortunate. Like 640Kb, FAT16, LBA48, etc. the days of 32-bit are numbered and 64-bit does everything it needs to do, including running your legacy apps and VMs. And like those technologies, it's annoying to be hit with it on "working" hardware but you will get no choice and will eventually have to upgrade anyway.
I deployed a network 3 years ago. 64-bit head to toe. An IT consultant queried why and I explained this same thing back then. You're going to have to do it at some time, and it might as well be on a major refresh like I was doing. With appropriate testing, obviously, but there are precisely zero problems related to 64-bit that have hit us. He's since gone elsewhere, where they've had to re-do all their machine images and servers on 64-bit because their use-cases mean they need more than 4Gb nowadays, and they bought the hardware upgrades without realising they'd have to have a 64-bit OS to use them, no matter what the motherboards could support.
I did the same at another workplace 2 years before that and it raised a few more eyebrows because of driver support but that wasn't my problem either - I specified machines with 64-bit drivers, got machines with 64-bit drivers, problem solved. The poor guy at the suppliers has to figure out what has those and what doesn't, and it's no longer an issue any more.
If you're not on 64-bit, do it next time you have the choice.
If you're "not going to touch 64-bit", prepare for a hard time next time you upgrade.
If you're already on 64-bit, you have nothing more to do.
Even ARM etc. - which is an entirely different use case - have 64-bit support in all their modern chips.
And even from a base level, 4Gb isn't a lot any more. Even for casual stuff.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:37PM
Spoken like someone who has absolutely no idea what he's talking about.
(Score: 2) by chewbacon on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:41PM
No, there's some truth to that. Installed some hardware on my desktop yesterday and the driver disk only had a 64-bit folder for drivers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @04:15PM
You can use more than 4GB of ram on any common 32-bit OS without having to do anything yourself (they all use PAE out of the box).
Thus your post contains absolutely no argument for 64 and comes across as completely clueless.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday January 26 2017, @05:03PM
The Redmond OS does not support PAE, apparently.
(Score: 3, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Thursday January 26 2017, @06:13PM
The higher end datacenter and enterprise versions of Win 2k and 2003 supported the full 36 bit PAE address space of 64GB. There were hacks and settings you could change in 2k workstation/server and XP Pro/2003 to get PAE working since they all used the same kernel.
tl;dr Thank god we have 64 bit.
For a windows application to use more than 2GB of RAM (virtual addressing was limited to a 32 bit space of 4GB with half reserved for the system, a 2-2 split) you had to use Address Windowing Extensions (AWE) in your application to let your application use more than the 2-4GB 32 bit limit. There were settings to allow for a 3-1GB split if your application needed the extra gig. Though that was all dependent on your application and less system RAM meant less cache for disk and network I/O.
Linux supported PAE and you used shm with mmap() to map files into memory. You could use over 4GB but you implemented your memory as a file and you had to fseek()/fread()/fwrite() to locations where you stored your data. Not easy or friendly to use as you built a memory manager using this system which as you can imagine how much of a bitch it would be to debug.
Both solution were very difficult to implement as you had to pay damn good attention to your memory management design. Both solutions didn't afford you the ability to call malloc()/realloc()/new/etc in your process to get over 2-3GB RAM; you were still stuck with a 32 bit process memory space. You had to implement your own goofy memory system or use a library if they existed (I think memcached is one).
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday January 26 2017, @09:54PM
My PentiumII-350 is running an SMP kernel with PAE support because it is recommended for that machine (debian).
Never mind that it only physically supports 384MB of RAM.
I guess we may not even be disagreeing since my use-case does not have any programs using more than 2GB of memory. (I do have that much swap available -- but the system would be unusable (more than it already is)).
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday January 27 2017, @01:04AM
And still no single process can use more than 4GB. Which is kind of a killer if, as indicated, single programs are using more than that already, demanding x64 instructions sets to even load (I've seen drivers, games, and other applications all demand such), and not supporting other configurations.
PAE is a paging hack, just like "expanded memory", "extended memory", "swap" or anything else that gets in the way of just asking for an amount of RAM from the memory allocator and getting it. Do you remember what happened to those terms?
Anyone can write a program on any -bit OS that accesses as much as you like, so long as you don't care about speed, complexity, managing it yourself and have direct access to hardware in ANY way. Hell, you just read and write a 2Tb file and you're done, or memory mapping on anything you can physically access (which can be a file or a remote network for all you know).
But bog-standard malloc support for stuff like that isn't present. You require software designed with that in mind. And, as I say, software like that is on the way out because application developers don't care about jumping through hoops when they can just say "Use hardware and software that's been standard for over a decade".
The argument for 64? You can jump through hoops like people did for a few years in the DOS days, the early Windows days, the early Linux days (I can remember LBA hacks and drive overlay support in Linux for hardware that didn't support it), and all had to be replaced eventually by just using a sane system with larger addressable memory directly. Or you can expect that to happen and next time you build something for yourself just select the 64-bit option, rather than having to do all that.
Literally - lose nothing, gain ongoing support forever.
Distros are dropping 32-bit left, right and centre.
Microsoft granted it some relief with Windows 10 after two years of threatening to remove support, you think the next version will have it? Server 2012 - 2016 are already 64-bit only.
The Linux kernel lists have talked about dropping it for years, and the bodge of x32 isn't going to be supported forever.
I'm not suggesting OH MY GOD BURN ALL THE 32'S! I'm saying its days are numbered. Like pre-Pentium support, like ISA bus drivers, like BIOS instead of UEFI. These things are dying off, dropping off supported hardware and software lists, and slowly disappearing. And the impact of 64-bit on systems you have NOW is likely nil past a reinstall or upgrade, or at worst a virtualisation of what you have.
So rather than coast along until one day the machines just don't work or have to be kept on insecure and unmaintained software, drivers or OS, the next time something happens, install the 64-bit version and save yourself the hassle.
Or join that one guy who still has an MCA bus in his machine and keeps trying to port the patches to Linux 3.0...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @05:23PM
"Everything is 64-bit by default and works just the same."
There's a problem with that statement.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @08:37PM
I have a couple of old AthlonXP desktops that I only rarely power-on. I recently powered one up and did all the software updates...only to realize the Firefox update killed it (no support for CPU's with SSE2) and none of the other big/mainstream browsers supported it either (best I came up with was Dillo.)
(Score: 1) by UncleSlacky on Thursday January 26 2017, @09:11PM
Midori or Qupzilla might run OK on it.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Thursday January 26 2017, @10:02PM
Firefox-esr 45.6.0 works on my PentiumII-350Mhz machine (stupidly slowly). It does not even have SSE support.
Maybe your distro is dropping i686 support as well.
I *did* run into that problem with Chromium though. It is particularly bad for old AMD systems because they lag behind one generation with the SSE support.
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday January 26 2017, @02:31PM
i wish i was allowed to install such things.
i fixed two windows xp sp2 machines this week; was told not to waste time upgrading them.
yep.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jdavidb on Thursday January 26 2017, @04:58PM
I still use 32 bit Linux (Ubuntu) every time I set up a virtual machine with VirtualBox. These are usually shortlived and not used for anything in production, but the last time I tried to run a 64 bit machine with VirtualBox I had to change the BIOS on my host machine and never could seem to get it to work. Is there a distribution that is going to continue to support 32 bit architecture for awhile? Or is it possible running a 64 bit guest OS with VirtualBox is not as hard as I think it is?
I'd like to know what suggestions people have, including if they think I should be doing something completely differently.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday January 26 2017, @10:21PM
I don't - I have used Debian since 2.2 "Debian Potato" and while I've used other distros for various things (Red Hat before RHEL, Mandrake, Ubuntu before the privacy row, Linux Mint) I always land back on Debian because I know how to operate it. I am taking inventory at the moment of all the computers in my home office, and count six Debian machines and zero machines with anything else, whatever that says about me.
BUT - My son uses Arch everywhere he uses Linux. And this has led to some interesting role reversal.
As a greybeard with some experience, I am used to his asking me for tech help -- but that is changing in the other direction. Because he uses and knows Arch, I find that he works at a lower level in some ways than I do when I use Debian, so when I get stuck he will more and more often now have some insight about what's going on and how to fix it... Strange feeling him giving me tech support instead of the other way around. Makes for a proud father here.
That, and I find that when I google for how to do something in the Linux world, I find the answer on that Arch wiki more often than anywhere else. It's like Arch is documenting all of GNU/Linux, one frustrated user at the time, that we might benefit from their expertise.
If those folks want to take their distro in a particular direction (using a new init system, focusing on 64-bit, whatever), then I know it will be inconvenient for many, but if it keeps the Arch folks doing what they love, then I see it as a net win for the free software community as a whole.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday January 27 2017, @02:48AM
This is why I started using manjaro: I don't really have time to mess with installing arch, but love the arch speed.
I now have i3wm on manjaro, but find xfce is speedy enough for most things.
Yeah, as I get older, I find I've got little time for deep learning, and arch documentation is great!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 26 2017, @11:42PM
Poeple get with it there more than newest $$$$$ intel chips. There are still 8bit z80 clones running in the world. I started out when 8bit 12kB systems were BIG AND FAST. There are uses for each. Linux started booting from a diskette now you need a memory stick because it won't fit that small any more.
Really all the 64bit gives bloat ware. Even the fastest CPU is no faster to the user than the old version because of the bloat and lack of core thought.
(Score: 2) by ese002 on Friday January 27 2017, @02:38AM
With only 1GB of RAM, why run 64-bit? Not only do I not have enough memory to make use of 64-bit addressing, a 64-bit OS has a larger memory footprint.
Larger memory VPS's are available, of course. But they cost more and aren't needed for my purposes.
Arch was not an available option. Neither was any flavour of BSD (my first choice).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @05:03AM
Yes. Three desktop PC's, one laptop, all 32-bit only. One desktop 64-bit. So one out of four (or only 25%) are 64-bit capable.
Not everyone cares to always buy the new shiny thing all the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @06:32AM
no and no. its 2017, my time can't be wasted playing with the OS. I need to get work done.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @02:33PM
amirite?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @07:49AM
Let's see
Firewalls: check (for reasons.. Very loosely based on the last 32bit release of a distro I shall not name, kept up to date from a mix of source tarballs and recompiled packages)
IDS Boxes: check (see firewall above)
Thin Clients: check (Transmeta Crusoe boards)
Laptops: Check (still a couple running 32bit Linux)
Netbooks: Check (IA-32 Atom based, the damn things are nearly indestructible especially since they've been retrofitted with SSDs)
VMs: Check (running on Windows, Linux and Mac hosts)
so, not so dead here..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @11:13AM
should have added..
Arch Linux?, no..and won't consider the main distro as a thing I'd install as it's systemd infected...
(before flames..yes I have and *do* run machines with systemd infected distros (actually, I'm down to a single machine now with a systemd infection, a laptop, and that's only surviving as I rarely need to use it for its 'nefarious' single purpose in life..)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 29 2017, @07:05AM
And it's doing good work too. But I'll live if I need to put something other than Arch on it.