When I started with x86_64 Fedora Core, I still built a few things as 32-bit applications on an otherwise 64-bit system; a 32-bit Firefox to use Adobe's 32-bit only Flash plugins, and a 32-bit mplayer so it could use Windows codecs to play various content. This has caused a certain amount of heartburn.

Recently, I decided to experiment with 64-bit versions of both (partly because doing the 32-bit compiles has been a pain; I build my copies of both from source). The results have been very pleasing.

• mplayer has added native support for various codecs while I wasn't paying attention, with results good enough for my relatively undemanding usage. I've successfully used it for FLV videos (YouTube's Flash stuff), Apple's Quicktime movie trailers, and some random AVI files. I suspect that it won't natively handle .wmv files, but I haven't needed to deal with any yet.

• Nspluginwrapper runs 32-bit plugins in 64-bit Firefox builds. Unfortunately it is a bear to get compiled and has some peculiarities when you're trying to use it. To save people the effort of wrestling with it, I've put precompiled x86_64 FC5 and FC6 RPMs up here, along with my hacked up SRPMs.

  (Don't even bother trying to rebuild the SRPMs under mock; nspluginwrapper has build requirements that as far as I know can't be expressed in what BuildRequires: allows.)

  One important and underdocumented thing is that the nspluginwrapper program must be run with the full path to a plugin's .so to install it. If you don't, it doesn't complain but it doesn't actually do anything, which is frustrating and annoying. (You can put the plugins anywhere; I like $HOME/.mozilla/plugins/i386.)

This does leave Java applets unaddressed for now; fortunately I don't need any at the moment, and apparently the gcj web plugin works pretty well (usage instructions for FC6 are here).

(And now back to wrestling with fonts, which is much like wrestling with pigs.)