Recommendations...

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

Gerry Hull <gerry at telosity.com> writes:
> 
> I just picked up an Lenovo X61 laptop the other day for a very good price.
>  This 3lb unit is a dual-core T7300 at 2.6GHz, 4GB Ram and 100GB disk.  
> 
> I want to run Linux as the core operating system, and use VMWare to load
> Windows for my Windows work.
> 
> I was thinking of Ubuntu 10.04.  My question is should I do 32 or 64 bit?  
> If I go 32-bit I will not be able to use all the ram, and if I go 64-bit I
> may not have all the drivers.
> 
> What are your thoughts/recommendations?

My wife has an X61, and the amd64 release of Debian 5.0 (Lenny)
works perfectly on it. If Ubuntu 10.04 works for you in general,
I don't see why it should be inherently more problematic to use
the 64-bit version.

One of our initial favourite things about going 64-bit was that,
before there was a 64-bit build of the Flash plugin available,
the 32-bit plugin would run `in' the 64-bit web-browser via
nspluginwrapper, which meant that Flash would actually be in a
separate process--which meant that when Flash crashed, it wouldn't
take the browser down with it. Unfortunately, there's now a native
64-bit Flash plugin and more recent versions of the `flashplugin-nonfree'
package use that instead of using nspluginwrapper; so Flash is back
to taking the browser down with it, which means that there's one less
advantage to running in 64-bit mode. It'd still go with it, though.

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."