Sean Middleditch

So I’ve been playing around with my new AMD64 machine more, and am still beating my head against the wall due to the lack of 32-bit package support on Ubuntu.

The idea is pretty simple. I want to be able to run, say, a game. The game is already installed in $HOME. I do not want a chroot, because that would imply reinstalling said game and doing a bunch of manual work to setup menu entries and such to invoke the chroot properly.

I’d really like to just be able to apt-get the necessary 32-bit libs and run the damn program.

RPM distros have some almost automatic support for this, as you can install multiple copies of the same RPM as long as they don’t have file conflicts. (Which is defined by MD5 sums in RPM, not just by path.) So I could install zlib twice; once with an package, and once with an AM64 package, and all my zlib-using apps, be they “legacy” 32-bit apps or 64-bit apps, will work.

For almost two years Debian has had a multiarch proposal floating around, yet almost none of the work has actually been done.

From most of the discussions I’ve read, it seems to be largely due to tons of bickering from people who assume that since *they* don’t need 32-bit apps, nobody else should be able to run them easily, either. Never mind the oft-repeated and constantly ignored arguments that many other architectures could use multi-arch support, and could use them not only for legacy app support but for improved performance.

Design by committee always sucks. Until someone in Debian who has the authority to say, “do this and get it done,” comes along, Debian doesn’t seem likely to get working multiarch support anytime soon.

Which means I’m going to have to run Ubuntu entirely in 32-bit mode with no 64-bit support at all, or switch to a distro where the engineers actually want to get things done and not repeat endless debates about, “only idiots want to run closed apps that we can’t just recompile for 64-bits.” :-/

Maybe Ubuntu will take the initiative and start pushing for the changes. Seems unlikely given that AMD64 needs multiarch the least; it’s all just user convenience. But then, Ubuntu is all about the users. That’s why I’m running it.

I have a new machine, finally. In general, it’s quite nice, although there’s a few disappointments.

The machine is a micro-ATX deal, which is awesome, since it fits on top of my desk instead of under it where all the evil dust mosnters live. The specs are beefy, having an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ and 2GB RAM. It runs fast, unexpectedly cool, and nicely quiet.

My beefs are mostly software related. Too much software is still broken on AMD64. In Ubuntu Dapper, OpenOffice.org won’t start, snes9x (I’ve gotten re-addicted to the games of my childhood) fails to run, movie codecs fail to load so things like Red vs Blue aren’t out of reach, etc. It’s all really irritating, since it almost feels like I’ve downgraded; I’d rather have a machine run programs slower than not run them at all.

That, at least, I can fix if it gets irritating enough by just installing an x86 version of the OS onto the machine. I’m fairly sure I’ll still get good performance, and both cores should still work, so I won’t be giving up too much. I can always reinstall the AMD64 stuff when it gets more mature.

The only other problem, which is more irritating since it can’t be easily fixed, is that there are not open source drivers for the onboard audio. It’s an NForce 4 chipset. NVIDIA has some binary drivers, which do produce sound, but they’re very crackily. I’ll have to look into that some more tomorrow. Ubuntu doesn’t offer pacakges for that which is very irritating, though.

I’ve been sick the last week.

Which sucks for me more than most people because I haven’t been sick (of the bacterial/viral infection variety) in over two years.

That’s a lot of money lost from missed work and a likely sucky weekend coming up; I had fun plans I’ll probably have to cancel.

Add to that the stress from my computer hassles and the bummer of age catching up to me and my gorgeous long hair thinning out very noticably on the top of my head, and this week has just sucked, hard.

If nothing else, now that my old computer is reassembled I might be able to spend some of this sick time hacking on some of my software projects.

So my new computer parts arrived Wednesday.

Lo and behold, after an hour and a half of carefully assembling the machine, including dismantling my old one to scavenge a few cables, the hard drive, and the DVD burner, I find that my new machine does not work.

Damn.

It posted twice, got to the BIOS screen twice, and locked up both times. Tigerdirect wanted me to call the motherboard manufacturer before returning it. Gigabyte folks asked me what was wrong, I explained exactly what it happened, and they confirmed it was most likely the board.

So, a new board was shipped to me from Tigerdirect, and I was charged for it, and it still doesn’t work. Booted up the first time, locked up, so I reset the machine, and then the motherboard freaked out on me just like the first one did.

So now I’m confused if I’ve had a bad CPU all along or if I have a second bad motherboard, or both.

The video card seemed to work fine the two times the machine booted, and the RAM is happily living inside my old machine right now (2GB - woohoo), so I’m going to ship back the CPU and motherboard. This time I’m not going to have them rush it, so I won’t get charged for it, but it’ll likely be another week before they get the returned parts and the replacements get shipped out.

The moral of this story is that hardware sucks. The only time software breaks is when the engineers makes a mistake, which is always fixable. With hardware, the physical universe is out to destroy your sanity and time.

Once the damn thing is finally running, I’ll have a gorgeous micro-atx machine with a dual-core AMD64 CPU, 2GB of RAM, a relatively decent NVIDIA video card, a 160 GB SATA hard drive, and a DVD burner. Until them, I’m stuck with this piece of crap, with its dying video card and sluggish CPU. But hey, at least it has RAM up the arse now.

So I have for the first time been truly bitten by DRM. Sure, I’ve had some trouble in the past with DVDs, but I got past that fairly easily.

I have about $250 worth of songs I’ve bought in iTunes. I have computers which are neither Macs nor Windows boxes. I want to listen to my music on my expensive speakers connected to my non-Mac/Windows machines. I can’t do this.

Songs bought from iTunes are encrypted. A computer must be authorized through iTMS (iTunes Music Store) to play the encrypted songs. There are utilities which can decrypt these files, but they no longer work. They either rely on iPods with old firmware running over firewire, which I don’t have, or that you bought your songs with a version of iTunes older than 6, which doesn’t include the latest $50-$100 worth of songs I’ve bought.

There just isn’t any way to play these files, at all, without using iTunes or an iPod, and that’s that.

I’m currently burning all of my purchased songs to a series of CDs, which I’m then going to rip back into OGG files with Sound Juicer. I might even go so far as to reencode all my MP3s as OGGs, or just rerip all my CDs. (The former is easier, the latter will give me better sound quality.)

Seriously, though, this is all a great pain in the ass for something which is completely, absolutely, entirely legal. Grumph.

Didn’t Apple have a firm non-DRM stance a few years back?

The only bill in the world I have is my car insurance.

And that just dropped by almost $60/month.

I’m going to be paying around $1000/year in insurance now, on a fully paid off 2001 Ford Ranger. I’m quite happy.