{"id":6,"date":"2005-08-13T00:04:38","date_gmt":"2005-08-13T07:04:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/intr.overt.org\/blog\/?p=3"},"modified":"2005-08-13T00:04:38","modified_gmt":"2005-08-13T07:04:38","slug":"somehow-32-in-64-doesnt-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/?p=6","title":{"rendered":"Somehow, 32 in 64 doesn&#8217;t go&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So I&#8217;m sitting at SFO waiting for my flight to Singapore and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gnome.org\/~jdub\/blog\/\">jdub<\/a> reminds me that it&#8217;s not much of a blog if it doesn&#8217;t contain anything.<\/p>\n<p>We released version 5.0 of VMware Workstation back in April, and it&#8217;s been getting quite a bit of indirect publicity as of late thanks to the whole <a href=\"http:\/\/apple.slashdot.org\/article.pl?sid=05\/08\/11\/1523221&#038;tid=179&#038;tid=174&#038;tid=190\">OSX-in-a-VM<\/a> thing that&#8217;s been going on lately; no complaints there. Well, another thing that&#8217;s been going on lately is that lots of people are getting 64bit systems and running 64bit distros on them.<\/p>\n<p>Great, you say.<\/p>\n<p>Not so great if you&#8217;re a non-trivial 32bit app, like Workstation is. It&#8217;s been a rather depressing experience to see the catalog of inequities that 32bit apps suffer from, despite claims of proper 32bit support:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Charset conversion faliure: This one seems to affect every single 64bit distro I&#8217;ve seen workstation run on. Maybe it&#8217;s something silly that we&#8217;re doing, but I can&#8217;t really see how. Unless you&#8217;re running in &#8216;C&#8217; or a UTF8 locale, you get a bunch of warnings explaining how glibc couldn&#8217;t convert from UTF8 to your current locale&#8217;s charset. I never see any obvious problem; it seems that 32bit gconv libraries are present, but it definitely isn&#8217;t happy.<\/li>\n<li>Themes: Pretty obvious what can go wrong here &#8211; no 32bit theme engine for the current theme. Can you say ugly?<\/li>\n<li>fc4 and librsvg: Now, librsvg and the svg gdkpixbuf loader are pretty core components these days, yet fc4 doesn&#8217;t include a 32bit librsvg anymore &#8211; although I guess you can probably get away with using the fc3 package or one from the 32bit build of the distro.<\/li>\n<li>SuSE 9.3 and dbus: Well, they were nice enough to include 32bit versions of libdbus, libhal and libdbus-qt but what about libdbus-glib. Not a trace. So, if you&#8217;re a 32bit gtk app that wants to register a dbus connection with the glib main loop&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And although it&#8217;s a largely historical matter now, I was always impressed that the first 64bit RedHat distro shared the \/etc\/gtk-2.0 between the 32 and 64bit libs, resulting in 32bit apps trying, and failing, to use the 64bit theme engines and pixbuf loaders.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not particularly surprised, but it&#8217;s pretty clear that the testing done for 32bit compatibility is pretty narrow, and I would expect that it&#8217;s limited to making sure that 32bit firefox works (good old flash&#8230;) Any app with more extensive dependencies is going to be in trouble.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sure you can guess what&#8217;s become a rather high priority for us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I&#8217;m sitting at SFO waiting for my flight to Singapore and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gnome.org\/~jdub\/blog\/\">jdub<\/a> reminds me that it&#8217;s not much of a blog if it doesn&#8217;t contain anything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-joy-of-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.intr.overt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}