[ltp] What to take care of when buying a Lenovo?

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:42:03 +0100
Christoph Lechleitner <lech@ibcl.at> dijo:

> Yves-Alexis Perez schrieb:
> 
> >> but don't expect major multimedia codecs or
> >> even 3rd party software to run on 64bit distros ;-((
> > 
> > Wich kind of "major multimedia codecs" are you refering to? I'm running 64
> > bits and dont really have problems with most multimedia codecs used nowadays.
> 
> The biggest problems are with with flash (e.g. sometimes on www.NFL.com,
> www.burgerking.at and others).

I use Gutsy x86_64 on my T61 and flash has always worked fine. However,
when I tried the NFL and Burger King links above you are right -
neither works. On the other hand, I am not interested in the NFL, and
the loss of Burger King must be divine providence.

> Java Applets don't work most of the time with a 64bit JRE, and
> connecting 64bit firefox with 32bit java plugin does not seem possible.

I have no problems with Java. I have Blackdown, and Sun 1.5 and 1.6,
and all work just fine. I installed all from Synaptic. Recently I
upgraded Sun 1.6 directly from Sun's website and the upgrade didn't
seem to care that I was using 64-bit Linux. I have never had any
problems with Java anywhere, except one home-made program that I need
for linguistics work. After I set my default Java to Sun 1.5 it works
fine as well.

> More problems are with recent M$ codecs, several older RealMedia codecs,
> and most quicktime codecs.
> 
> For example I can't use the EuroSport Player, I can't use about 1/2 of
> the videos and streams on websites, even if finding the streaming url
> itself (in the html or javascript code) and feeding into several players
> like mplayer, xine, vlc, kaffeine, totem, with gstreamer and xine backends.
> 
> Other programs unavailable in 64bit (but run most of the time, using
> ia32-cages) include Opera, Skype, GoogleEarth, Acrobat Reader, and
> RealPlayer.
> Of course those are all from very small firms incapable of compiling
> 64bit binaries ...

I use the alpha of 64-bit Opera and it works fine. Previously I used
32-bit Opera which I installed with --force-architecture, and it ran
fine as well. 

I installed Skype from Synaptic and it "just works." It may be a 32-bit
program, but Synaptic fixed whatever it needed. I also installed Google
Earth, Adobe Reader 8.1 and RealPlayer without any problem. Adobe
Reader is in Synaptic, and for the rest of them I had to search the
Ubuntu forums for the how-to, but it was never more complicated than a
couple of commands from a terminal window.

As for other codecs and stuff, Totem has played any movie I have thrown
at it so far. I also have no problem playing anything with VLC and
Mplayer. For a while Rhythmbox couldn't play MP3s, but that seems to
have been fixed.