AMD_64 Linux distro recommendations?

[Dan Gennidakis]

Thanks that helps greatly. 
 
Since most of my work experience has involved supporting Red Hat and Suse systems. I will install both Fedora Core 3 and the new Suse 9.2 to play with the new system. 
 
I may dable with Gentoo and Ubuntu also as I run those at home for Desktop systems currently.
 
Thanks for everyone's input. Looking forward to playing with my new toy when I pick it up today ;-)
 
Cheers,
 
Dan

"D. Hugh Redelmeier" <hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
I have installed Fedora Core 3 on three Athlon 64 systems -- an HP
zv5000z notebook and two HP Pavilion a530n desktops. Much better than
FC2, as I recollect. I have not tried other distros.

Most of the problems are not AMD64 related. But I get the impression
that fewer folks use AMD64 so that quite as many bugs have been
previously discovered.

The nForce 150 chipset was not supported properly (so that the IOAPIC
could be used) until some mid 2.6.9 series kernel. So it just made it
into Fedora Core 3's updates in the last week or two. There are a
one or two lingering problems: halt(8) no longer seem to power off the
machines (ACPI hell?).

The major problems are in the notebook and that comes down to hardware
makers (HP and OEMs) not disclosing specs to LINUX folks. I deserve
this since I was a sucker and bought the machine without requiring HP
to support LINUX.

Beware: don't count on ndiswrapper in 64 bit mode. The wrapper itself
is just starting to work in 64 bit mode, but 64-bit WindowsXP drivers
are not always available. 32-bit WindowsXP drivers won't work with a
64-bit LINUX.

Perhaps this is the case with Winmodem stuff too.

I have no idea about CODECs for video etc.

Browser plugins have the same problem. You can run 32-bit browsers in
FC3-64 and then the plugins should work. I've not tried this.

Note: userland supports 32-bit code but drivers run in the kernel
and cannot be 32-bit.

Summary: FC3 seems the same in 32 and 64 bit versions. Some of the
hacks for running WindowsXP code won't work.

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