x86_64 woes

I now have an amd64 (Sempron) desktop and an emt64 (Core 2 Duo) laptop and fully 64-bit and Y2K38 ready, which I am quickly finding out that it doesn't get it's share of love.

For example, Firefox/Thunderbird nightlies and OpenOffice don't have x86_64 builds. Now, if you have a 32-bit OS on a x86_64 architecture, it's ok and you can emulate. But if your running x86_64 without 32-bit libraries, your in trouble.

Fortunately, my desktop is equipped with Ubuntu, and the greatest package manager, ever.
All you should need to do is :

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
sudo apt-get install ia32-gtk


This runs prism with a few warnings about an unsupported locale or something. Which is a lot better than compiling it from source.

My laptop however uses BlueWhite64, and I by slackwarian code (this is a complete lie), must compile everything from source. Unfortunately, here I don't have any of the 32-bit libs. So that's a lot of compiling. I wonder if it's even worth it. I'm fairly tempted to just skip it and download the i386 packages. But that would be taking the ubuntu way out, and I'm likely to get lynched by people like me.