As Igalia bought a new laptop for me (actually this is done for every worker from the second year on), I installed Debian Amd64 on it as a challenge, because everybody was telling me about all the problems: flash, scratchbox and all the ghosts they could imagine. I thought: ‘this can’t be that difficult’ and somebody has to try at least to say why it is a bad idea. And maybe we could collaborate a bit with that architecture, this exactly what I am doing right now. Why did I choose amd64, already explained, but what about debian? It’s because of purity. I couldn’t give up on installing debian just because it is not that easy as Ubuntu… Let’s face it! And I did it! As far as I remember the biggest problems I faced where nvidia’s driver (I could make it work only with nvidia’s proprietary driver and thank Juan), the wireless driver (I had to install the firmware), fingerreader (you have to install the driver and configure pam) and flash (I just installed flashplayer-mozilla package and it worked at the very first moment). For the kernel I just borrowed berto‘s configuration and changed the things I needed. There are some remaining things that don’t work yet (like hibernation), but I don’t care very much.
One of the most scaring things for me were the scratchbox because everybody was telling me that it couldn’t be installed under amd64 and I could get much problems because of that. Steps:
apt-get install ia32dpkg -i --force-architecture scratchbox-*.deb
That’s it (uhuuu, I’m afraid of the 64 bits!).