Re: [gentoo-user] Re: 32bit or 64bit

[Alecks Gates <alecks.g@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 3:57 PM, Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17/07/12 19:43, Alecks Gates wrote:
>>
>> On Jul 17, 2012 11:32 AM, "Volker Armin Hemmann"
>> <volkerarmin@googlemail.com <mailto:volkerarmin@googlemail.com>> wrote:
>> *snip*
>>  > The only use case that might come up is wine - I don't know anything
>> about
>>  > that beast. Haven't had any use for it in years.
>>  >
>>  > --
>>  > #163933
>>  >
>> I use wine daily on 64 bit with no problems.
>
>
> 64-bit Wine cannot run 32-bit Windows applications.  You need a 32-bit Wine
> for that.  And since in 99.9% of Windows software is 32-bit... well, you get
> the point :-)
>
>
Sure, but 64-bit wine can run either a win32 or a win64 config, and
you have to enable win64 with the "win64" USE flag.  I believe this
makes the win64 config default and you have to set WINEARCH=win32 if
you want only 32-bit.

According to the winehq docs[1] the WINEARCH environment variable
"Specifies the Windows architecture to support. It can be set either
to win32 (support only 32-bit applications), or to win64 (support both
64-bit applications and 32-bit ones in WoW64 mode). The architecture
supported by a given Wine prefix is set at prefix creation time and
cannot be changed afterwards. When running with an existing prefix,
Wine will refuse to start if WINEARCH doesn't match the prefix
architecture."  It is meant to be able to run both 64-bit and 32-bit
applications, but I think it's a bit buggy -- I've had some trouble
installing microsoft visual c++ runtimes due to running a win64
config, but I could have been doing it wrong.

[1] http://www.winehq.org/docs/wineusr-guide/x258