Bollucks

Truth be told, I wasn’t entirely disappointed the other day when my desktop computer failed. I knew my data was OK so I wasn’t worried about that. I’ve always used hand-me-down computers and the thought that I finally had just cause to get myself some technologically up-to-date hardware was exciting for me.

I had been looking around and had kind of determined that changing motherboards and hardware was not a terribly difficult thing on a Linux system. Basically, it came down to making sure that the proper kernel was present on the harddrive and that the bootloader could find that kernel. Given that the current system is functional enough for me to install packages, I was confident I could make the transition relatively painless.

Certainly less so that for a Windows box.

In my zeal, I went for a 64-bit motherboard/ processor. Support for the 64-bit stuff on Linux has been around for awhile so I felt I’d finally get the chance to take advantage of it. So I orderd an Asus motherboard with an AMD Phenom processor. I’ve had good luck with AMD stuff so I didn’t see any reason to go in another direction.

Still, something kind of nagged at me. My initial notion that all of those programs compiled for 32-bit systems just magically working on the new hardware just didn’t seem entirely right. Frankly, it seemed to good to be true. So I started poking around to see what I was getting myself into.

Turns out, it is to good to be true. For good measure, I also found this. Ugh.

The hardware hasn’t arrived yet, and the old machine is running OK for the moment. I’ll be digging into this one a little more to see what approach makes the most sense.