[wellylug] 64-bit Linux

Brent Wood pcreso at pcreso.com
Wed Oct 12 18:34:03 NZDT 2005



> Having just built myself a new AMD64 3200+ machine I've been playing
> around with Gentoo for AMD 64 and must say that I am pretty impressed with
> the overall speed, but a little concerned about the lack of applications
> that have been ported to 64bit (no Openoffice yet for example).
> What other Linux distros offer 64 bit versions? Can anoyone provide me
> with copies of them? (I will of course replace media).

Hi Jamie,

I have used Ubuntu 5.04 for A64,which seemed fine, though a beta of v5.10 was
very broken when I tried it. Now I'm a very happy SuSE 9.3 user. A fair bit of
compiling from scratch, but that's more my fault coz of the oddball stuff I
wanna run.

Generally I have found SuSE to have better A64 bit support than Mandrake &
Debian. It comes with Novell's late beta of v2 Open Office for AMD64, & you can
upgrade via YaST when v2 is formally released. 

If you want total control (& geek heaven), Gentoo is fine :-) if you wanna nice
easy to use GUI based distro for A64, I think SUSE is it. Ubuntu is nice, and
works well, but the package list for A64 is unimpressive.

I had major issues with Fedora 3, never worked well, haven't tried 4. Don't
want to.

Note that the A64 version of SUSE requires a DVD player, as the CD version only
supports 32bit. 9.3 is a few months old now, and it is impressive how many new
or upgraded A64 packages are online compared to the DVD. It suggests SUSE A64
support is serious. 

See 

ftp://ftp.iinet.net.au/pub/suse/Suse/x86_64/9.3/suse/x86_64/ 

for an almost local repository.

I haven't played with OpenSUSE 10.0 so can't comment there....

I loved a comment from a Debian devotee at the 'fest. After some years of
proclaiming Debian as the only true Linux, after watching a SUSE 9.3 install,
the comment "Hey, even my mother could use that!" was uttered :-) Not that
you're a newb, but YaST is a very nice yet another setup tool, (even if Daniel
thinks the DHCP setup is broken).


FYI, anandtech did a review of 32/64 bit performance recently, using MySQL &
DB2. Not good news for Intel, but definately suggests a 64bit OS helps on AMD.



Cheers,

  Brent




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