Troy Dawson wrote:
> 
> It depends on the application.
> There are alot of 32 bit libraries in the x86_64 distro.  So alot of 32 
> bit applications work just fine.
> Probrubly the most used example is the flash plugin for your browser. If 
> you install the 32 bit firefox, the 32 bit flash plugin works just fine.
> 
> But I'm sure there are some 32 bit programs that are going to have 
> problems.
> 
> *Troy puts on his mind reading hat*
> How do I install 32 bit libraries and applications?
> 
> You put .i386 at the end.
> 
> An example is installing the 32 bit version of firefox.
> 
>   yum install firefox.i386
> 
> Since I still have my mind reading hat on, I see that you are 
> complaining that the firefox.i386 isn't installing because it conflicts 
> with firefox.x86_64.
> 
> That is usually the difference between applications and libraries.
> The 64 bit libraries usually reside in some directory called /lib64/, 
> like /usr/lib64/.  Because of this, you can have both the 32 bit 
> libraries (that reside in a /lib/ directory such as /usr/lib/)  and the 
> 64 bit libraries on your machine at the same time
> But applications are different.  When you start firefox, what do you 
> type?  You type "firefox".  You don't type firefox.i386 or 
> firefox.x86_64.  So, there is a conflict with most application, you can 
> only have 32 bit or 64 bit installed, but not both.  If you install both 
> of them, then it usually is the last one win's, so there isn't really a 
> point in having them both installed.
> 
> So, my example above really should have been
>   rpm -e firefox
>   yum install firefox.i386
>   yum --enablerepo=macromedia install flash-plugin
> 
> But I figured I'd actually answer that third question before it was asked.


OK, I asked from the single application installation perspective, 32-bit one if the 64-bit 
version is not available.


Since you mentioned firefox, is there an 64-bit adobe flash plug-in available for firefox 
x86_64? What happens with the current 32-bit extensions for firefox and thunderbird 
regarding firefox x86_64?