Which 64 bit distro should Pat install on his new system?

Post by **Patrick** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 11:15 am

Mind you this is my first experience with a 64 bit distro. This is also my first AMD based system. I'm feeling very virginal at this moment. Please post your reasons why I should pick a particular distro.

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 11:24 am

Hmmm, it's awfully hard to resist recommending Vista, but I've got to go with Deeebian. I hear their AMD64 support is pretty good, and there's some 15,000+ packages available. Which distribution would you be going with? Stable, testing, unstable?

You could give Gentoo a shot. Compiling would probably be tolerable on a machine like that.

Post by **Patrick** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 11:26 am

Wally Balljacker wrote:Which distribution would you be going with? Stable, testing, unstable?

It would be testing if I went the Deeeeebian way.

Chess · Post by **Chess** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 11:28 am

I voted Deeeeebian too, since I would be interested to hear how it goes.

Dammit, Pat, now you have me thinking about spending money on a 64 bit system...

Judland · Post by **Judland** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 11:30 am

I'd have to say Mandriva. Of course the next release, 2007, is only about a month and half away. But they still have 2006 for 64 systems.

Post by **Patrick** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 11:30 am

Chess wrote:Dammit, Pat, now you have me thinking about spending money on a 64 bit system...

For a couple hundred bucks it's not a bad deal. If you have a little more cash you might want to spring for a dual core processor. Check out the AMD/motherboard combos.

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 11:31 am

You're gonna get the standard distro pimping from all of us here on the forum. If I were you, since you're going to be using a new architecture, I'd go with the distro you're most familiar with.

Post by **Patrick** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 11:38 am

Wally Balljacker wrote:If I were you, since you're going to be using a new architecture, I'd go with the distro you're most familiar with.

I pretty comfortable with all of the choices except maybe Vista. Even though the dark horse choice is Gentoo I have done two stage 1 installs in my lifetime. I would be curious to see if it only takes 16 hours instead of 48. That would be quite an improvement!

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 11:48 am

Patrick wrote:
Wally Balljacker wrote:If I were you, since you're going to be using a new architecture, I'd go with the distro you're most familiar with.
I pretty comfortable with all of the choices except maybe Vista. Even though the dark horse choice is Gentoo I have done two stage 1 installs in my lifetime. I would be curious to see if it only takes 16 hours instead of 48. That would be quite an improvement!

lol, I ran Gentoo for about 5 months on a P4 1.8 GHz, and compiling every single piece of software from source, while it has its benefits, is extremely frustrating at times. I can't even count how many times I would leave my computer to compile over night, only to find out that it had left me with a compilation error 6 hours ago. Gentoo is cool, but the administration/compiling can be maddening at times. I've been much happier with sane, binary distros since then.

Post by **Patrick** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 11:50 am

Wally Balljacker wrote:
Patrick wrote:Gentoo is cool, but the administration/compiling can be maddening at times. I've been much happier with sane, binary distros since then.

Agreed, the compiling gains are pretty much hyped. God bless you if you have the time, will and energy to run Gentoo. It's not for me.

Wally Balljacker · Post by **Wally Balljacker** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 12:31 pm

Some other 64-bit distros to consider:

Fedora
Mandriva
Kanotix
Frugalware

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 12:32 pm

Wally Balljacker wrote:Gentoo is cool, but the administration/compiling can be maddening at times.

Let alone be the whole issues of updating configuration files, and then out of frustration just accidently overwriting your udev configuration files and then the damn system won't boot!!

Patrick wrote:Mind you this is my first experience with a 64 bit distro. This is also my first AMD based system. I'm feeling very virginal at this moment. Please post your reasons why I should pick a particular distro.

AMD makes extremely good chips, I wouldn't be too worried out it. Speaking of AMD, I'm gonna stick around, despite Intel's new Core 2 chips, I'll stick with, and support, AMD as they support free software (http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html + http://www.linuxbios.org/index.php/User:Yhlu).

I say go with SUSE, they were the first distro to support AMD64, so they know what they're doing in that area, they have a very good handling of the whole browser plugin issue, plus extremely good KDE support that is still alive and well and better than ever.

Also, keep a good eye on SUSE 10.2, today I participated in an openSUSE status meeting, and 10.2 looks like it's gonna be great!

Kernel 2.6.18, X.Org 7.1, KDE 3.5.4, GNOME 2.16, and lots of other good stuff! Let alone be the build service that they're doing.

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 1:23 pm

Tsuroerusu wrote:
Wally Balljacker wrote:Gentoo is cool, but the administration/compiling can be maddening at times.
Let alone be the whole issues of updating configuration files, and then out of frustration just accidently overwriting your udev configuration files and then the damn system won't boot!!

That's why you run dispatch-conf when it tells you to so you can see what has changed and you can then use the new config, edit it, or totally reject it because when you make changes to config files having them change when you don't expect it is just plain annoying. But sometimes new versions of software have new options that you might want enabled. It doesn't automatically overwrite the files like you said it does and you can mask any config files you don't want it to ever ask you to update it.

I have had a lot of luck with Gentoo but I understand that you don't like it so I am not going to tell you to try it and since my experiences with other distros hasn't been that wonderful with any of the distros I have tried lately I don't know what else I could suggest.

BTW does Arch use AMD64? last time I checked it was built for i686 although you can still use it of course...

Chess · Post by **Chess** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 2:22 pm

CptnObvious999 wrote:BTW does Arch use AMD64? last time I checked it was built for i686 although you can still use it of course...

Yep. Right on the front page: "Currently we have official packages optimized for the i686 and x86-64 architectures."

64 bit install iso available on the download page:
http://archlinux.org/download/

I have been browsing their forums re: amd64. It seems like it works, although not all packages have been recomplied. There is only 1 maintainer from what I can tell. He has a list showing his progress here:

http://pansy.at/arch64_todo.html

yeti · Post by **yeti** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 3:55 pm

Patrick wrote:I would be curious to see if it only takes 16 hours instead of 48. That would be quite an improvement!

i'd go for it!

it would be a decent burn-in cycle for the new kit