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Re: [LUG] AMD64

 

Martin White wrote:

Hi people,

Is anyone else here using an amd64 based machine?

I'm running into some severe issues with my Gentoo install. In a nutshell a recent update managed to break something and the more i try to do to resolve it the more i run into trouble and the worse it gets.

Whilst the forums have quite a number of people citing that they've been usng Gentoo on amd64 for X months without issue, that's certainly not the global case and the more i dig the more i think that gentoo on amd64 is NOT ready for the big time yet. The kinds of problems i'm seeing in the forums are serious problems with compilers and such, not trivial things.

Anyway, so i started looking about for alternatives but on most it's quite unclear the state of play of the 64bit versions.

I've never liked RH (now Fedora of course). Mandrake is out since i'm not prepared to live with the rubbish you get after shelling out €120 for a subscription. Just check their forums and see how many unhappy people are leaving in droves!

So i looked to SUSE, the other one i was VERY impressed with on the "just works" front.

Does anyone know the state of play with the upcoming 9.3? It says "supports 64 bit processors" but doesn't explicitly say whether you get a native 64bit version in the box or whether, just like XP the whole thing runs in 32 bit mode.

One of the reasons for choosing gentoo was getting speed optimised packages because they were built to my specs. This works very well on my server and i don't plan to change it, but i'm guessing with amd64 this is negated a bit since as long as it's native 64bit (as much as possible) then it WILL be optimised for the processor anyway since there's no historical 386, 486, etc to support (if you see what i mean!).

Any other 64bit recommendations or thoughts?

Martin.

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If you're prepared to download a 3GB ISO then you can get Suse 9.2 from their FTP site. Has both 64-bit and 32-bit versions of the OS on the same disc, and works nicely. On my Athlon 64 it detected the 64-bit CPU and made the selection for 64-bit, although I could have selected 32-bit if I wanted.

You can get it from here: ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/x86_64/current/iso/SUSE-Linux-9.2-FTP-DVD.iso

Rob


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