Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2015 08:54:58 -0453.75
From: "William A. Mahaffey III" <wam%hiwaay.net@localhost>
Message-ID: <55D9CF68.7070409%hiwaay.net@localhost>
| 'uname -a' at a CLI on the host will tell you 32-bit or 64-bit, just FYI
Yes, I know ...
Linux eos.noi.kre.to 3.13.0-62-generic #102-Ubuntu SMP Tue Aug 11 14:28:35 UTC 2015 i686 i686 i686 GNU/Linux
which doesn't actually say "32 bit" but I'm sure that's what the "i686"
really means - but I knew that anyway, I know I installed a 32 bit system,
the question was whether that is what I should have done.
It doesn't really matter now, this works entirely well enough while I wait
for NetBSD to catch up (X drivers are so far out of my experience that there's
not much I can do to help) so I'm not going to change it .. even if enough
time passes that this laptop gets replaced before it ever really runs native
NetBSD (it has of course done that already ... just without X, so not usefully).
I suspect that the Linux web page advice may have been written back in the
days when Intel processors didn't support 64 bit mode, and the only people
who would want the 64 bit kernel were those with AMD processors - which would
also run x86 kernels of course, so just advising everyone who isn't certain
to use the x86 kernel was probably an intelligent thing to do. That might no
longer be so reasonable, but I don't know - knowing nothing about linux, I
don't know what the trade-offs are in choosing which system to pick. It also
might have changed by now, all this happened a couple of years ago.
kre