Still, I find the Acer 5050 an unstable laptop in either Windows or Linux, but it could be that mine has a defect. It’s stable for long stretches then locks up on occation, especially when moving the machine,which could indicate a bad solder joint. Also, the machine doesn’t like heat. Keep it cool and it seems to run well. Run it under-clocked , as it has more than ample CPU power even at half throttle (dual core chips).

I’ve got 4 gigs ram in mine and when running 64 bit OS, the performance is commendable. I ran VMWare server on it, and it’s pretty fast. Overall, for the price I paid, it’s not a bad system. It’s holding up over time, but it’s definately not top-end-quality, but I paid low-end price so, for the performance, I can’t complain too much. I will be more picky in the future though. Oh, I also upgraded the hard disk to a 250 gig drive, that makes it nice for multiple OS’s and doing video work (which I do on this laptop, as ironically it’s my fastest computer)

Cappy: yes, people are working on resolving the issues with some packages, but the point is that until 32 bit is completely eradicated, there will always be programs being produced that DO have 32 bit dependencies that are NOT bundles (take the Amazon Mp3 store program for example).

Like you hinted at though, the main problem with getlibs is that its purely “runtime” at the moment.

Whats up buddy?

Not many things require getlibs. The statically linked skype doesn’t require getlibs anymore. Cairo-dock just went 64-bit.

The only thing left, that I know of, is just the Adobe stuff but those have their own amd64 packages developed for them or tutorials.

It really isn’t worth the effort to put getlibs in Gdebi because it wouldn’t be acceptable quality and hardly anything is delivered in just 32-bit anymore.

For instance, if you told getlibs to install packages “x y z” it doesn’t (and can’t) check to see if the 32-bit versions are installed first.

There are a few other issues but they all revolve around getlibs needing to repack the 32-bit libraries into 64-bit packages before installing them rather than just extracting them into /usr/lib32.

As for stuff like skype getlibs does look like a nice and simple solution. However for stuff like skype a lot of people have already solved this with the package manager, like medibuntu for skype (and I think wine as well, does that build for x64 properly yet or is it 32bit app in 64bit packages? like ia32-libs), saving us from using another application at all. getlibs seems good for a quick solution, but I think I would prefer to use a package someones made for amd64 with the 32bit apps rather than forcing a loads of 32bit apps on my system (and possibly mixing all the stuff together), good alternative when this isn’t the case though.

Although generally not an issue for me since flash is the only 32bit app I use I think.

Welcome to the planet Mikey! Now get to work