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. It seems to me it would be easier simply to install i386 and avoid the pain. 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 have checked on the net for benchmarks between i386 and AMD64 and there is no obvious overall install that is faster. It would seem that the simplest path would be to install Debian 7 i386, this would allow the latest wine to be installed without any problems and I cannot myself see any down side. The system would still have access to the all the memory the only limitation being the 4gig process limit. There may be an issue with the speed of memory access on some of the latter video cards with large amounts of memory availible as this memory will need to be bank switched. This does not appear to be a problem at this stage. Hmmmmmmmmmmm, I have two main systems both efectively identical I will install i386 on one of these this will allow wine to be installled easily and the other one can be used to allow a comparison to be done between the two versions (i386 and AMD64) using 3D intensive software (a terrain simulation) to see what if any differences exist. I do have Debian i386 readily availible. Any comments would be apreciated! Lindsay