About using the 64 bit version of Fedora Core and Web browsing using the Flash plugin. I have an 64-bit AMD Athlon processor so when I wanted to install Fedora, I took the 64 bit version. The 64 bit version is great, but you run into a problem. For web browsing, there are some Firefox plugins that I use. The most important one to me is that flash plugin, which is required in order to view a lot of web content that is out there. Here is the problem: You can’t use the flash plugin, which is distributed as a 32 bit binary together with a browser that is running off of a 32 bit binary. So, I went and ran ‘yum download firefox.i386’. Good, now you have the 32 version also installed. I tried to run Firefox, but that 64 bit version started up. First I tried to uninstall Firefox by typing ‘yum remove firefox.x86_64’, but that tried to remove too many other important packages. Turns out that the file through which Firefox starts up from on Fedora is actually a script. I edited this script and commented out lines 40-43 in order through which the script will select the 64 bit executable to run. Here are the lines of code that need to be commented with pound (‘#’) symbols in order for this to work:

if [ -x "/usr/lib64/firefox-1.5.0.9/firefox-bin" ]
then
MOZ_LIB_DIR="/usr/lib64"
fi

The 32 bit version of Firefox will now startup and be able work with the 32 bit plugins. BTW, I am using the beta version of Flash 9 for Linux, you can get it here. It is able to display new content that can’t be seen with Flash 7, the current release version for Linux. It may have some stability problems though.