[WBEL-users] Frustrations on x86_64

[Sean Dogar]

Daniel J. Summers wrote:

> Good evening.
>
> I'm becoming quite frustrated with my WBEL 4 x86_64 install.  This 
> isn't a slam on the product - I'm grateful for it, and I'm sure 
> there's a critical piece of information that I'm missing that makes it 
> really, really useful indeed (apologies to Thomas the Tank Engine).  
> Rather, the point of this is to ask for help, as I've researched this 
> stuff and come up empty.
>
> What is the trick to building things under this architecture?  Some 
> packages bomb in the ./configure step.  Some compile fine, but if you 
> use the --enable-shared=yes directive (as you have to, to use these 
> with other things), gcc gripes about not being able to relocate a 
> label (or something like that).  OpenOffice.org doesn't run, and the 
> work-around, I've been told, is to install the i686 version too.  To 
> me, this seems  strange - is that what RH tells their folks?  The 
> installer is a rebuild of RH's installer, so if it fails for us, 
> surely it's also failing for them.  (Or is it?  Am I wrong to think 
> that this is a kludgey fix?  Should I download the oo.o source and try 
> building it on my machine?)
>
> Oddly enough, xine and xine-ui built perfectly - download the tarball, 
> rpmbuild -ta, and install - good to go.  I'm even hosting these rpms 
> on my website, and have had over 600 downloads in the past 2 months, 
> with no one e-mailing me saying "hey, this crap didn't work!" - so 
> they must be good.
>
> I guess I'm just grasping at straws, trying to figure out what in the 
> world the difference is (both between xine and something like liba52, 
> and i686 and x86_64).  I ran WBEL 3 on an Athlon XP box fine for over 
> a year, until the hardware began having stability issues.  And, I can 
> tell that the 64-bit WBEL 4 runs the machine much more efficiently 
> than the 32-bit Windows - I can tell that just by how much the fan 
> comes on (or doesn't).
>
> Maybe I'm missing the whole "shared module" concept - I'm trying to 
> get transcode to work, and I've found x86_64 rpms for all requirements 
> except two, and these are the two that gripe about not being able to 
> relocate.
>
I agree.  I've had an x86_64 machine since January, and I haven't found 
a distribution that I'm truly happy with yet.  I don't consider that a 
flaw in WhiteBox....I simply think that while x86_64 is a good arch for 
server apps, it's not quite ready for the desktop yet.  For me, 
annoyances have been things like no 64-bit Flash or Java (although I 
think the Java situation has recently changed). 

What alleviated most of my problems was to simply run a 32-bit browser, 
and use the appropriate plugins for that, but even that turned out to be 
a bit of work, as there were either missing libraries or ones in the 
wrong places. 

I've run Linux on both SPARC and PowerPC, and I think the thing that 
confuses me most about x86_64 is all of the compatability libs and 
stuff, since it's still backward compatible with IA32.  I know it's 
possible to compile for either architecture, and I think I made a false 
assumption that it would pretty well be cake to transfer my IA32 stuff 
over.  There are still some makefiles and installers that simply bomb 
out when confronted by a non-i386 architecture.  I'm OK with that...I'd 
just like to know how to have my compile environment set up better for 
compiling i386 binaries on x86_64 when I need to. 

-Sean