I love the internet. I also love Debian. I am starting to develop unhealthy emotions towards OpenOffice. I am definitely a geek.
Perhaps it’s the lack of sleep talking, or maybe the caffeine, but the internet has once again validated all that is awesome about people being able to share random bits of information with one another. For behold! I have discovered how to get 32bit apps running neatly on my amd64 based linux server.
I’ve been annoyed a few times when I wanted to run something under amd64 only to find that a package hadn’t been built for it yet. Alas! Mostly it didn’t bother me a great deal, since I can live without Windows Media Player codecs for totem or flash animations in Firefox: I could always use my laptop.
I was rather peeved when I discovered tonight that I couldn’t run OpenOffice under amd64 and I’d left the power cord for my laptop at the office. I had a conference presentation due last week and had to get it finished tonight. I wasn’t keen on having yet another night slip by without getting it done.
The internet to the rescue, courtesy of the Debian amd64 howto.
A big thankyou to the authors. I was not only able to easily build a chroot environment to house my i386 based stuff, safely corralled away from my amd64 stuff so none of it got clobbered, I was able to easily use apt-get to install openoffice.org and it all Just Worked! Awesome!
In under a week I’ve had a wireless keyboard and mouse Just Work. I found an emacs mode for subversion. I found a new online comic to read, and I’ve also found some blogging software for Plone that I think I can use to replace my own custom hack here.
Now if I can just get my DVB tuner to work properly, I’ll be a very happy camper.