Arch Linux is now 64-bit only! No more i686/32bit! [Archive]

smartboyathome

April 1st, 2009, 05:47 AM

http://www.archlinux.org/news/440/

That is right, Arch Linux is dropping 32bit support. It is only 64bit now. I am glad this is happening, since almost all hardware supports 64bit now, and 32bit is now just as big a setback as i386 was for Arch.

Skripka

April 1st, 2009, 05:48 AM

32bit is only for w****rs anyway.

etnlIcarus

April 1st, 2009, 06:01 AM

If this isn't an April Fool's joke (which it almost certainly is), that just made my choice a lot easier. Think I'll be sticking with debian-based distros for a while longer.

OutOfReach

April 1st, 2009, 06:04 AM

I saw that earlier, I actually believed it for a short 10 minutes. (Hint: I saw today's date).

namegame

April 1st, 2009, 06:06 AM

I, for one, am glad that the developers are abandoning this archaic and aging technology. This falls right in line with Arch being for advanced users that like unstable systems. ;)

Polygon

April 1st, 2009, 06:09 AM

if its an april's fool joke: haha funny

if its not: terrible move. a lot of older computer still use 32 bit only processors, and arch linux is geared towards older hardware since its so lightweight and modular.

inobe

April 1st, 2009, 06:15 AM

I, for one, am glad that the developers are abandoning this archaic and aging technology. This falls right in line with Arch being for advanced users that like unstable systems. ;)

i have yet to give it a go but i rarely install 32bit environments besides the army of libs .

dspari1

April 1st, 2009, 08:13 AM

That's a good way to alienate all those people that just bought a netbook.

ameyer

April 1st, 2009, 08:46 AM

I saw that earlier, I actually believed it for a short 10 minutes. (Hint: I saw today's date).

http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fgroups.google.com%2Fgroup%2Farchlin ux-br%2Fbrowse_thread%2Fthread%2Fd1b6075adf9eba2d&sl=pt&tl=en&history_state0=
seems to suggest that it's real, there are posts from the 30th.
On the other hand, they should know that you don't announce stuff on April 1st.

EDIT: Not that I'm saying it's real. I still think critical mass for killing off Linux on i386/i686 is several years away.

Sef

April 1st, 2009, 09:01 AM

EDIT: Not that I'm saying it's real. I still think critical mass for killing off Linux on i386/i686 is several years away.

Some distros will be in the forefront of this movement.

myusername

April 1st, 2009, 09:07 AM

wow i was almost incredibly angry

ameyer

April 1st, 2009, 09:49 AM

Some distros will be in the forefront of this movement.

And in some ways Arch seems extremely cutting-edge.
If this is real...
Considering that 32 bit only hardware is still widely available, it seems a bit soon.
Heck, considering the number of people with 64 bit hardware that still install the 32 bit version...

etnlIcarus

April 1st, 2009, 10:25 AM

Heck, considering the number of people with 64 bit hardware that still install the 32 bit version...
It's not my fault I'm too cheap to buy enough RAM to make using a 64-bit OS feasible. >.>

mips

April 1st, 2009, 10:27 AM

1 April 2009

April fools...

Before anybody gets their panties in a knot.

JackieChan

April 1st, 2009, 10:39 AM

If this isn't an April Fool's joke (which it almost certainly is), that just made my choice a lot easier. Think I'll be sticking with debian-based distros for a while longer.
Ditto

adamlau

April 1st, 2009, 10:41 AM

Nah, it's true alright....

Solicitous

April 1st, 2009, 11:29 AM

Does anyone actually think (I believe it is a joke) that it is a good idea for a distro to announce (if it is a joke) something like that on their main site under News??

I was reading their forum and common sense says "no it isn't true", but still leaves some doubt in ones mind.

.Maleficus.

April 1st, 2009, 11:34 AM

I hope this isn't true. I might have to actually resort to installing Gentoo on my server :|.

jimi_hendrix

April 1st, 2009, 12:31 PM

april fools!

Mr.Elendig

April 1st, 2009, 03:09 PM

It is not a joke, it's a part of an internal conflict in arch:
http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2009-March/010971.html

There is a solution for those that want i686 tho:
http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2009-April/004226.html

Oh, and see the reason for close on this one:
http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/14052

mips

April 1st, 2009, 03:21 PM

Nano_ext3

April 1st, 2009, 04:13 PM

Mr.Elendig

April 1st, 2009, 04:18 PM

ROTFLMAO, thats almost believable.

Some people are obviously going to take this seriously.

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=68825

smartboyathome

April 1st, 2009, 04:19 PM

Either you are joking or are a COMPLETE moron

I believe Arch would do something like this. How do you explain them abandoning i386 several years ago if it wasn't similar to now? :popcorn:

SuperSonic4

April 1st, 2009, 04:27 PM

Well the 64bit flash plugin is in extra and the sun jre plugin appears to be in community and those two plugins seem to cause the most problems

Nano_ext3

April 1st, 2009, 06:40 PM

I believe Arch would do something like this. How do you explain them abandoning i386 several years ago if it wasn't similar to now? :popcorn:

Um, because i386 is for OLD pre-pentium processors? If you use a pre-Pentium I or pre-Pentium Pro (before Pentium I) still than I feel sorry for you... No need to support those dinosaurs, not even the poorest company has them so why support them. If you were trying to just "argue" me then I wonder why. Next time, please review material before trying to make a point.

"In open source and especially Linux computing, it refers to compiler optimization for Pentium Pro and all later Intel processors, and the Athlon and all later AMD processors, as compared to "i386" builds that are slower but more compatible with older processors"

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I686

namegame

April 1st, 2009, 06:46 PM

Either you are joking or are a COMPLETE moron

An avid Archer would never call Mr. Elendig a moron. Mr. Elendig is fairly well known in the Arch community...

Nano_ext3

April 1st, 2009, 06:50 PM

If that is the case my bad, if an April fools joke , then shame on you. I find that odd that he has 0* posts, and There are HUNDREDS of well known people who contribute DAILY to the Arch community. I apologize for the use of the word "moron" but it was a horrible thing to believe especially on a day such as today. Show me proof and I shall believe you, simple as that.

tjwoosta

April 1st, 2009, 06:54 PM

its definatly an april fools joke

if you try to post a repy on the arch forums with the words "april fools joke" it will automatically change it to say "good idea!"

haemulon

April 2nd, 2009, 08:56 AM

It's beginning to look like this was not a joke after all.

Odd that they would choose to make an announcement like this on April Fools day.

I certainly will stay away from these pranksters in the future.

I guess they think they're real cutting edge by dropping 32 bit support so early on.

tbroderick

April 2nd, 2009, 09:09 AM

It's beginning to look like this was not a joke after all.

It never looked like anything but a joke :-s

Eisenwinter

April 2nd, 2009, 10:48 AM

I, too, am starting to believe this might not be a joke.

I guess we'll know sometime later today (it's April 2nd).

Personally, I hope it's not a joke, I want 32-bit to die out already.

.Maleficus.

April 2nd, 2009, 11:26 AM

Well, turns out this was just a masterfully executed April Fool's Day joke. Between the announcement on the dev mailing lists, the post in their News, the 16 page thread in the forum and all mods/devs in on it, I think that was one of the best planned jokes I've ever seen.

etnlIcarus

April 2nd, 2009, 11:39 AM

Between the announcement on the dev mailing lists, the post in their News, the 16 page thread in the forum and all mods/devs in on it, I think that was one of the best planned jokes I've ever seen.

It'll be interesting to see the long-term impact. I get the feeling this could be the next, "there's DLL's on my *nix!", Mono hysteria.

.Maleficus.

April 2nd, 2009, 11:49 AM

Oh yeah, and as someone posted before, they applied filters to the forum to change anything that might give it away. Some of the mods even straight-up edited users posts :).

Filter list. (http://dev.archlinux.org/~allan/filters.png)

forrestcupp

April 2nd, 2009, 01:44 PM

tjwoosta

April 2nd, 2009, 02:52 PM

Do you have any links to the evidence that it was a joke?

uhhh

yea just read the arch forums

its all over the place

the devs admited it all last night, about 8 or 9 hours ago

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=68825&p=17

forrestcupp

April 2nd, 2009, 03:14 PM

uhhh

yea just read the arch forums

its all over the place

the devs admited it all last night, about 8 or 9 hours ago

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=68825&p=17

Thanks. :)

Mr.Elendig

April 2nd, 2009, 03:24 PM

SomeGuyDude

April 2nd, 2009, 03:39 PM

That's a good way to alienate all those people that just bought a netbook.

FWIW I don't think the netbook crowd is exactly monstrous. If your netbook is your only machine, chances are you aren't computer savvy enough to be screwing with Linux anyway.

Rumor or not, I switched to Arch64 two nights ago with ext4 and it was the best decision I've made in a while. The 64-bit support has really come a long way. :guitar:

Skripka

April 2nd, 2009, 03:46 PM

FWIW I don't think the netbook crowd is exactly monstrous. If your netbook is your only machine, chances are you aren't computer savvy enough to be screwing with Linux anyway.

Rumor or not, I switched to Arch64 two nights ago with ext4 and it was the best decision I've made in a while. The 64-bit support has really come a long way. :guitar:

A word of warning with Ext4-be VERY wary of improper shutdowns. Most apps and DEs are NOT written with Ext4's delayed allocation in mind--resulting in config file corruption of open apps after a hard reset.

I actually reinstalled all my packages last night just quickly through Shaman-and it made my system far happier-after several hard resets, my Amarok packages themselves were too corrupted for reinstall. And I had to remove then redownload/reinstall.

Again, this is a problem on the app side and not on Ext4s side.

SomeGuyDude

April 2nd, 2009, 03:48 PM

Shazam. That sounds rough. What constitutes an "improper shutdown" then?

Skripka

April 2nd, 2009, 03:56 PM

Shazam. That sounds rough. What constitutes an "improper shutdown" then?

Hitting the reset button on your tower. In short anything where your apps are not closed and the drive is not unmounted before powering off...such as a power failure.

I tried benchmarking a newer OC state on my new CPU yesterday and I suffered a few hard freezes....by last night my DE was being uber buggy-and I did a reinstall of installed packages-and Arch is far happier now....fortunately with a quad core CPU @ 3.7 gHz, it only took 10 minutes and a reboot for a reinstall ;)

Mehall

April 2nd, 2009, 04:08 PM

Hitting the reset button on your tower. In short anything where your apps are not closed and the drive is not unmounted before powering off...such as a power failure.

I tried benchmarking a newer OC state on my new CPU yesterday and I suffered a few hard freezes....by last night my DE was being uber buggy-and I did a reinstall of installed packages-and Arch is far happier now....fortunately with a quad core CPU @ 3.7 gHz, it only took 10 minutes and a reboot for a reinstall ;)

I'll be safe then, I would only run ext4 on my best computer, and that's a laptop. Power cuts when you have a battery pack? ;)

smartboyathome

April 2nd, 2009, 04:15 PM

I have no idea why my postcount here is 0, since obviously, I have multiple posts here >_>

Looks like the forum is as buggy as the distro :p

Only support posts count, and any posts over 2 years old have been deleted.

Nano_ext3

April 2nd, 2009, 04:22 PM

I have no idea why my postcount here is 0, since obviously, I have multiple posts here >_>

Looks like the forum is as buggy as the distro :p

My aplogies, so what is your involvement with Arch? Any links to projects or works?

smartboyathome

April 2nd, 2009, 04:22 PM

A word of warning with Ext4-be VERY wary of improper shutdowns. Most apps and DEs are NOT written with Ext4's delayed allocation in mind--resulting in config file corruption of open apps after a hard reset.

I actually reinstalled all my packages last night just quickly through Shaman-and it made my system far happier-after several hard resets, my Amarok packages themselves were too corrupted for reinstall. And I had to remove then redownload/reinstall.

Again, this is a problem on the app side and not on Ext4s side.

Sorry for the double post, just saw this. I haven't suffered from the Ext4 bugs because I added rootflags=data=ordered to my kernel line in grub's menu.list. This turns off the caching function and writes everything to disk. At the cost of a little performance, it keeps things stable. :)

binbash

April 2nd, 2009, 06:21 PM

Just removed arch linux and installed gentoo.

Arkenzor

April 2nd, 2009, 06:30 PM

FWIW I don't think the netbook crowd is exactly monstrous. If your netbook is your only machine, chances are you aren't computer savvy enough to be screwing with Linux anyway.

My Eee 900 is my only machine and I'd assume I'm savvy enough to use Arch since I'm running it. At any rate, I don't really need a particularly powerful computer in order to write code, send e-mails, watch movies, listen to music or read research papers...

You need to configure a pretty specially environment to make efficient use of the very small screen but once it's done no problem. The lack of disk space does annoy me from time to time, but I don't really have the money to buy a real laptop. A desktop computer is out of the question since I usually spend less than 2 hours per day at home.

As for ext4 data loss, I tend to forget about my battery level and get hard shutdowns quite often but have yet to lose any data. But then it seems like the problem lies mostly with desktop applications that edit their configuration files themselves (and forget to fflush), and I don't use many of those.

mips

April 2nd, 2009, 06:46 PM

You need to configure a pretty specially environment to make efficient use of the very small screen but once it's done no problem.

The lack of disk space does annoy me from time to time, but I don't really have the money to buy a real laptop.

External display?

External HD?

Does not have to be the biggest and most expensive models either. Second hand would also do.

Mr.Elendig

April 2nd, 2009, 06:58 PM

My aplogies, so what is your involvement with Arch? Any links to projects or works?

I'm just a normal user, who spend some time abusi.. er.. helping people on irc, and I got evil operator powers in the channel.

Polygon

April 2nd, 2009, 08:45 PM

I have no idea why my postcount here is 0, since obviously, I have multiple posts here >_>

Looks like the forum is as buggy as the distro :p

your so funny. ubuntu and arch can run the same software.

anyway, posts in the cafe do not count towards your post count

and thirdly, now that we are past that foolish holiday, is arch really going to 64 bit only?

jespdj

April 2nd, 2009, 08:52 PM

is arch really going to 64 bit only?
Ofcourse not man, haven't you gotten yet that it really was a joke? :rolleyes:

Eisenwinter

April 2nd, 2009, 09:18 PM

It was all a very well planned joke.

Read the front page on Arch's website for proof.

mips

April 2nd, 2009, 09:23 PM

It was all a very well planned joke.

Read the front page on Arch's website for proof.

That's what I said, but nobody believed me, instead they got their nickers in knot. ;)

Arkenzor

April 2nd, 2009, 09:23 PM

External display?

External HD?

Does not have to be the biggest and most expensive models either. Second hand would also do.

I use a 500GB USB drive for backups, but it's pretty big so I have to leave it at home. No external monitor though. I'd have to leave it at home too and I barely spend any time there.

But it's not like I'm dissatisfied with what I currently have. I can use it for pretty much anything I need to do.

gletob

April 2nd, 2009, 10:57 PM

From reading that mailing list it seems like some of the arch devs are just not people persons.

mips

April 2nd, 2009, 11:41 PM

From reading that mailing list it seems like some of the arch devs are just not people persons.

They are actually bots.

Skripka

April 2nd, 2009, 11:43 PM

They are actually bots.

Shhhhhhhhhh. The Normals aren't supposed to know.

smartboyathome

April 3rd, 2009, 12:09 AM

Shhhhhhhhhh. The Normals aren't supposed to know.

Oh they weren't supposed to know that many of the Arch devs were bots? Oops, I've been saying that for a while to people. :(

stchman

April 3rd, 2009, 12:28 AM

While I am a proponent of using 64 bit OS when your hardware supports 64 bit, what about potential Arch users?

This may threaten their penetration into netbooks.

Skripka

April 3rd, 2009, 12:32 AM

While I am a proponent of using 64 bit OS when your hardware supports 64 bit, what about potential Arch users?

This may threaten their penetration into netbooks.

HINT: it was an April Fools Joke.

jespdj

April 3rd, 2009, 02:16 PM

While I am a proponent of using 64 bit OS when your hardware supports 64 bit, what about potential Arch users?

This may threaten their penetration into netbooks.
Some people really need to have their noses pressed on the screen:

2 April 2009 - i686 support not being dropped (http://www.archlinux.org/news/441/)

Hi, Arch Linux users, we are pleased to inform you that the i686 architecture is not going to be dropped from Arch Linux. It all was part of an April Fools joke, in which all the developers and the forum moderators played a big part.

Interestingly, this joke actually did some good. Some of our users discovered that they were, in fact, running 64-bit processors, and many of them switched to the Arch Linux 64-bit version. We encourage anyone who already switched to keep using the 64-bit version, to continue contributing to the architecture and encourage support from other major software vendors.

A prime example of a vendor giving in to the demands of the 64-bit community is Adobe. They've recently added 64-bit Linux support to the flash plug-in, for which we thank them.

Sorry for any inconvenience this joke may have caused, but how can we resist a prank on the 1st of April?
Now, does it finally dawn on you that it was an april fool's joke? :rolleyes: