Every year, I have to declare my income to the tax services. In the preceding years, I managed it with mostly no problems. This year, my computer being in the amd64 architecture, I feared I would have some troubles and I was right: one hour later, I could not yet do my declaration, and I used only about three minutes under MacOS X.

I started with a small advance: I already had a valid certificate till 2010, recognized at first try. I could then fill my tax form (the certificate is in PKCS 12 format, so I could later use it on the Mac to finish the declaration). The downfall was at the time of the signature: the java applet that was to be used to sign would not work.

Note: This article is part of my Testing stuff with QEMU series.

From the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port page:

Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a port that consists of GNU userland using the GNU C library on top of FreeBSD's kernel, coupled with the regular Debian package set.

Q: Why would anybody want to do that?
A: Why not? [1]

So, after we have talked about that, let's start:

I just began working seriously on installing desktop machines in 64 bits at work, and this gave me some insight into the 64 bits transition problems: biggest being commercial applications that work only in 32 bits.