Firefox and java applets under AMD 64

[Henk Koster]

On Fri, 11 Aug 2006 18:03:35 -0500, Kenneth P. Turvey wrote:

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> I installed Dapper on my AMD Turion based laptop.  Recently I discovered
> that there isn't a java plugin for this platform.  I would like to have
> java work on web pages where applets are used.  So I was looking into
> this.  I understood that the Opera browser doesn't require a plugin, but
> hasn't been released for this platform either.  
> 
> So I was thinking about installing a 32 bit version of Firefox.  I assume
> this will solve the problem.  Is there any reason not to do this?  I
> assume all the plugins will work under this platform?  
> 
> I would prefer to stick with 64 bit applications, but I guess I'm not tied
> to this option.  Apparently Sun doesn't think we want a 64 bit desktop and
> neither does Opera.  

Well, we would all *love* to have just 64-bit applications on our 64-bit 
platforms, but alas... Luckily, there is 32-bit compatibility mode, so
that you can run 32-bit applications in a 64-bit OS (not
chroot-ed) provided they don't rely on 64-bit library calls. Examples:
Acrobat Reader (acroread) and Opera 9 (and, indeed OO). As far as Opera is
concerned, they provide a statically-linked .deb for this purpose on their
download site, install it with "sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture ...".
You may also need to install ia32-libs -- these packages work fine on my
64-bit Opteron-based system under Dapper amd64.

Hope this helps.