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This is a little off-topic. Aside from Gentoo and Fedora users, has anyone else used an x86-64 distribution with success? I'm going to be building a new system soon with an AMD chip. I will probably use Gentoo as that's what I'm used to and use now but I was wondering about other distributions, and their present state of maturity?

has anyone else used an x86-64 distribution with success?

Yes,beside Fedora and Gentoo i'm running CentOS (RHEL4.0) now.

This might help: http://lwn.net/Articles/123820/

I've used Suse 9.1 & 9.2 with AMD64 3200. All the out-of-the-box stuff works fine. 9.1 didn't like upgrading or adding any software from other than Yast upgrade. Haven't tried 9.2 with any other upgrade source yet.

Plenty of mistakes that do not relate to not having english as first language. Please proof-read before you post your articles. Makes it hard to read with all the mistakes.

However, it is a very interesting topic

Roger, your grammar is less than perfect.

Cheers to Anton for going to the effort and sharing his x86-64 experience, and to OSNews for facilitating it.

I use Mandrakes latest x86-64 cooker and it works great

From a terminal run "nvidia-settings".

I found the typos and spelling slightly irritating too, but maybe the editor could/should have sorted that out? (is there an editor?)

I personally found the article interesting, I'm impressed with Anton's guile in getting some of that stuff working, and I've been wondering if AMD64 might be a good solution to my Laptop dilemma. (I've been wondering if an AMD64 laptop would be a good choice over a P4 "ball burner" or Centrino - which I'm still not sure about)

A linux laptop head-to-head would be cool, does anyone know of such a thing with an AMD64 machine featured?

I have tried both SuSE and Mandrake with great success.

Garret

Microsoft and Intel are positive about the 64 bit direction and Linux seems to be already there too.

-> Linux was there a whole long time before microsoft, this article suggest that linux is trailing behind MS, where in fact it's exactly the other way round...

Just a note about the Java sdk you get from sun for AMD64; it is set by default to use the -server option. This may not be desired if you are using your AMD64 machine for a workstation. You may want to set it to use the -client option. Thanks for the article, I just set up a similar machine myself

We could run 64-bit Linux or NetBSD 10 years ago. On Alpha for example. We need x86-64 just to run Windows.

Everyone seems so excited about 64 bit as if it were a new technology or something. The only reason we haven't had 64 bit processors for the masses is the wintel monopoly which had their hand forced by AMD. It should be interesting to see how things pan out in the server markets with the two open 64 bit architectures; AMD64 and Sparc versus the proprietary Power64 architecture from IBM. Intel and HP's lame effort doesn't even deserve a mention anymore.

Hmmn, writer asks why can't ATI and NVIDIA drivers be included on the install disks?

Isn't that because they are closed source drivers

"Everyone seems so excited about 64 bit as if it were a new technology or something. The only reason we haven't had 64 bit processors for the masses is the wintel monopoly which had their hand forced by AMD. It should be interesting to see how things pan out in the server markets with the two open 64 bit architectures; AMD64 and Sparc versus the proprietary Power64 architecture from IBM. Intel and HP's lame effort doesn't even deserve a mention anymore."

Actually, if you knew anything about processor/computer design, you would also know that there is a big disadvantage to using 64 bit, especially if you aren't ready to take advantage of it. Unless you were running some sort of database, it wasn't worth it. Hard drives were way too small, memory requirements were low, and CPU architecture just wasn't there.

> Isn't that because they are closed source drivers

http://fedora.redhat.com/about/
The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software.

So does this mean that short is 32 bits, int 64, and long 64?

> So does this mean that short is 32 bits, int 64, and long 64?

Not. This means (void *) is 64 bits.

Nope.

A short is still 16 bits, an int is still 32 bits, though a long is indeed 64 bits wide. Also note that all pointers are stored in 64 bits. So storing a pointer in an unsigned int is not going to work a an amd64.

BTW rthe summary of the article sucks, Most linux distro's have been supporting the amd64 platform for more than a year (if not more than 2 already) now. The problem with Intel is that they focussed on teh Itanium, while in the meantime AMD has a big hit with their x86-64 CPU. Now that Intel finally has their own x86-64 CPU, Microsoft is getting warmed up for 64 bits computing too.

I ran x86_64 fedora for a while. It was great & quiet ... but I use the machine as a media/email/backups more than anything. It works great except (sadly) there was no realplayer. I use realplayer to stream BBC Radio and I could never get it to work with Helix or 32 bit Realplayer.

Yes, BBC radio does mean that much to me.

Both Debian pure64 and Ubuntu amd64 ports work fine as well. I have been using them for over a year now.

using SuSE 9.2 on AMD64 and it's almost perfect.
there are just two minor issues for desktop use:

1. Flash doesn't work with a Firefox that was
compiled for x86_64 bit arch. You need to grab a firefox
that was compiled for x86 or use konqueror which can
work with a 32 bit flash.

2. xine with the w32codec's isn't as stable for streaming
windows media.

Everything else just works (RealPlayer 10 wors just fine).

I am using the 64 bit Linuux port from RHEL 3.0 days. as Centos. CENTOS 4.0 uses RHEL 4.0 and the multilib is really well set. I have Mplayer , Realplayer working like charm for me. Even Adobe Acrobat 7.0 works well for me. The new NVIDIA driver works for me. I had to add some repositories for FC3 in Yum.conf for adding extras. ndiswrapper also works to get my broadcom card working. So in terms of what I miss from a 32bit Linux ; Well Macromedia Flash for one, but really it is annoying any way.

On completely other point , Solaris on AMD64 is pretty good too. With packages from bolthole.com it is certainly going to be a competition.

I used Fedora on a AMD64 2800 for a short time as a game server. It was a little flakey but overall decent. I will say the AMD64 cpu was a huge improvement over the P4 2.53GHZ that was in the server previously i think most fo the performance gain was due to the embedded memory controller.

GYUM is dead. YUMEX (http://fedoranews.org/tchung/yumex/) takes over from where it lets off.

I'm running Suse 9.1 on some Quad-Opterons here, and all in all, it's working very fine, nearly no difference to an IA32 Linux.

However, there were some minor problems, let me sum them up for you:
1. Java
Though our boxes come from Sun (v40z), Sun hasn't yet managed to port their JDK to 64bit. This is a problem for Java applications making use of JNI, as JNI thus requires 32bit libraries which, in most cases, aren't installed. This is particulary interesting for Tomcat based web applications making use of e. g. rrdtool, icmp stuff etc.)
2. My first point also implies that installing these 32bit libraries means you'll probably need some other 32bit libraries they are depending on
3. Installing binary application can become difficult if these applications depend on 32bit libraries not available or attempt to call syscalls themselves (e. g. statically linked apps).
4. Porting applications can become a pain in the ass if these applications weren't written in a portable way. Most of the problems arise when it comes to pointer arithmetic.
As already mentioned before, on AMD64, sizeof(int)=4 (still), sizeof(long)=64. There are some applications out there casting pointers to unsigned (or even signed, lol) integers in order to perform pointer arithmetic like manual alignment etc.

Apart from that, I have to admit I was very happy to see Suse running that well on x86_64. Speed improvement is significant, though this has nothing to do with 64bit at all (more because of the Opterons great design and the advantages of AMDs NUMA arch in comparison to Intels SMP systems).

Well i use for amd64 gplflash latest version, and works at 80%
it's better then nothing ...

I have an HP machine with MCE 2005 on it. It's an AMD64 3400+ with a gig of ram and all the usualy tv tuner, dvd writer stuff on it the MCE machines come with. Any chance of getting Linux to run on it and perform the same functions of MCE? Why? Just because...

This was not the final version of my article. OSNEWS publish it because they could not contact me because of wrong alternative mail address.

I may create a web-site devoted to Fedora AMD 64, based on this article and your comments.

I did not mean that Linux is trailing. 64 bit Linux was out long before the unreleased 64 bit Windows.

I am using archlinux on my amd64. We have ported a ton of packages and all i can say is the gentoo guys better watch their back! We should be able to release an arch for the x86_64 soon. for more info go to http://genesis.blogdns.net ;-p

"The red notifiacation area " ummm... there is something called spell check.

One of the articles first comments is that 64-bit CPUs ability to address more RAM isn't very important. For a desktop machine that might just be true. I however have been administering Opteron servers with either Fedora or RHEL3/4 and 16GB of RAM each for over a year now. As database servers the amount of RAM is very important, the more the merrier. In this regard and for the bang for the buck, AMD64 is great. I'd love to be able to get them with 16 or more DIMM slots in a 1U or 2U form factor.

Anybody want to explain how Sparc is more open than Power?