| William H. Magill on 27 Jan 2005 03:31:48 -0000 |
|
On 26 Jan, 2005, at 20:51, Michael Lazin wrote: My linux box died a little while ago, and I am thinking about building an Athlon 64 machine to be my new linux box. Does anyone in the group have experience with 64 bit linux? What kind of 64 bit software is available? I am leaning towards suse as a distro. Any distro recommendations for 64 bit? I am building this machine because I like to play around with hardware and I like to use Linux. I am currently running my web and mail servers on (gasp) mac os x. Maybe I will switch my servers over to this machine after I build it. Can't say much about the x86 implementations of 64 bit Linux, but I've run several releases of both SuSE and Red Hat on my Alphas over the years before switching over to FreeBSD recently. (Starting back about SuSE 6 ... I preferred SuSE to RedHat, but again it's an Alpha thing. SuSE would boot from CD, RedHat forced you to make those damm floppies.) Applications were always the issue for me. It always took "a long time" for ports to get made to the Alpha. How much of the problem was Alpha and how much was the fact that until recently Alpha was the only serious 64-bit platform, and DEC/Compaq the only source for 64-bit "support" -- is anybody's guess. Now with AMD and PowerPC (i.e. IBM) pushing 64-bit Linux, one would assume that things have changed pretty dramatically. Consider that things like Oracle and the like are available on 64-bit Linux. Plus, most Open Source code is 64-bit clean these days. Again on the Alpha, the Compaq C Compiler always (and I believe still does) generated much more efficient code than Gnu C. The really funny thing is that Linux was developed on the Alpha. Madd Dog got Linus an Alpha, back in DEC/DECUS days, and for a number of years that was his platform of choice. But that was long, looong ago, when DEC still was top dog and still pushing VMS instead of Unix. Today, I prefer FreeBSD simply because I grew up with BSD Unix, and am far more comfortable with it's structure than with the structure of Linux. Which is also the reason I find OS X to be quite "comfortable." T.T.F.N. William H. Magill # Beige G3 [Rev A motherboard - 300 MHz 768 Meg] OS X 10.2.8 # Flat-panel iMac (2.1) [800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg] OS X 10.3.7 # PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg] Tru64 5.1a # XP1000 [Alpha 21264-3 (EV6) - 256 meg] FreeBSD 5.3 # XP1000 [Alpha 21264-A (EV 6.7) - 384 meg] FreeBSD 5.3 magill@mcgillsociety.org magill@acm.org magill@mac.com whmagill@gmail.com ___________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
|
|