zlinw@mcmedia.com.au writes:
The situation is this I require to be able to run wine on my systems here (Debian AMD64) and I am finding this something of a pain with the current Debian. The version of wine required is 1.6. To install the develpment enviroment for wine ineffect requires an almost complete parrellel install of a 32 bit system.
So? A system overspecced enough to run wine will surely have a spare 2GB of nonvolatile storage for all the IA32 libraries.
It seems to me it would be easier simply to install i386 and avoid the pain.
IMO that depends on if this box is expected to do much else, besides wine. In any case, multiarch in Debian 7 should not be painful; if there is a problem, file a bug report.
There it appears only to be a minor issue in that the maximum memory for a single process would 4 gig and I have yet to see any program even gimp editing full size images from my Nikon D700 come even close to that figure.
I would be thinking more of firefox and eclipse. OTOH, I hear bad things about imagemagick builds with high quanta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
I have checked on the net for benchmarks between i386 and AMD64 and there is no obvious overall install that is faster.
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ x86-64 represents a substantially higher lowest common denominator than IA32 (e.g. wrt SIMD), which may matter for pre-compiled distributions.