Re: Is amd64 ready for the desktop?

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 02:40:40PM -0400, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
> Although mplayer works it seems to fail on some certain files.  Under
> i386 I never had any problems.  In fact when I have problems I simply
> switch to my wife's i386 machine and play them there.  Music files are
> mostly fine.  It is video that seems to have problems.

mplayer is currently not able to use the win32 codecs on amd64. That
means only the formats with open source implementations are supported.

> I use gramofile which is a curses or ncurses based app.  The screen is
> messed up by strings that look like this:
>     "bad format `p'ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo..."

I can trigger this problem with mc in a chroot on my -current build box
quite reliable. The funny part is that after starting the bulk build, it
disappears. This is very fishy.

> Audacity won't run at all.  It dumps core.  I tried building everything
> with symbols but I don't get full information on the backtrace:

Lots of glib code does stupid things with pointers, so this is not
really a surprise. jemalloc made this worse.

Joerg