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...that AMD64 will be stable for fedora core till the release of FC2.

> Of course one can try their luck and emerge them anyway

That's what one usually does. There aren't so many gentoo-amd64 users out there (though we've got our own forum subsection!) that you can "expect" anybody to test the apps you want to use.

Just a little side note: If you want to use gentoo on AMD64 then READ the tech notes at http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/amd64/

Sorry, it seems the tech notes weren't moved over to http://amd64.gentoo.org/

So here's the link: http://dev.gentoo.org/~brad_mssw/amd64-tech-notes.html

So anyone bothered with benchmark comparisons between gentoos for amd64 and the g5?

just a random question, but is it worth to buy an amd64 now or is it still too expensive compared to a similar p4?

I can't speak for others, but I would personally wait 2 or 3 years.

I'm about to build an amd64 based system and basically came to the same conclusions from bits I have read. I think Gentoo is definately the way to go as it uses the 2.6 by default (extremely important considerring thats where the work is for this arch), plus it doesn't try to mix 32bit and 64bit. You can, and there are instructions, but it is not recomended. And as was said, there are new ports coming out all the time - a lot of the masked ones are just because they haven't been tried, if there is a known problem it is marked -amd64.

Sorry but its fresh in my head - got to do your research folks!

Oh and jodie... athlon64 is cheaper and faster than similar p4.

Gentoo devs don't have time to test every application, so if something doesn't have amd64 keywords on it, please test it, and if it works let us know by posting a bug report to bugs.gentoo.org, it will benefit all users! Gentoo is a volunteer based distribution unlike the others mentioned in this article, so we need as much help from the user community as possible with testing.

Thanks!

-Brad House

There was an interesting link in last week's Debian weekly news about Debian for AMD64.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-amd64/2004/debian-amd64-200402/msg00...

Lot of politics, but looks like things will work out.

64bit is still an experimental platform, meaning unlike 32bit you can’t just install and run whatever apps you want, as you still need to check compatibility as stuff is still running as 32bit compiles. I got a system because I needed an upgrade anyway, so, hay I might as well go 64 and give it a go. So far I'm still running W2K and it's been a waste. But now that Gentoo has a live 64bit version out (for about 6 day or so), it will still be another couple of months till I think about the move over. Things like WINE / Windows emulation are still a big requirement on a Linux box if you want to watch movies and such.

If you want to have fun in BETA phase of x86_64bit then join the gang otherwise hold off for another 6 months and wait for all the major player to release 64bit versions of there own.

As far as I remember... AMD64 is also know as X86-64, and not X86_64 (That was how Intel submited their extensions with the new Xeons...)... Why so many references as "X86_64" instead of "X86-64"? o_O

"Things like WINE / Windows emulation are still a big requirement on a Linux box if you want to watch movies and such."

I'm not sure what goes under "and such" but watching movies under Linux is great. totem/xine offer an excellent interface through which to watch DVDs or avis/mpegs. For anything that wont run on those, mplayer seems to do the trick. I personally get very annoyed by the Windows Media Player interface.

Video playback is one area where I feel the Linux offerings are much more enjoyable than what Windows offers.

Does valgrind work fine on x86-64?

Vojtech Pavlik
Subject: Re: Intel vs AMD x86-64
Original message
On Sat, Feb 21, 2004 at 07:12:20PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

[...]

As far as I know, the real reason for the underscore in x86_64 in Linux is that autoconf/configure hate dashes in arch names, because of this notation:

x86_64-gnu-linux-pc

If a dash were used, the string would be unparseable without prior knowledge of all arch names.

I forgot how it's done on RH, but know for sure that Mandrake has 'I' for interactive start, where you can decide to not start certain services.

This is very useful, for instance if you have changed your network, and there is currently no dhcpd running on any server, and your machine will expect that -- if you don't use the interactive boot, you have to wait for the timeout for ethX.

Also, if you have made some system modifications (hardware, bios, whatever), and your system doesn't boot anymore, you can use this to troubleshoot.

Really, it is not something useless from older times.


Another point: nice splash screens are what users want, but if you don't, lilo and grub are easy enough to set up to get rid of it. And no it doesn't matter on a server, but then again, who'd know, if it's a real server it's likely headless anyway. And - how often do you boot a server? (Outside of the setup and testing phase, naturally, where you have to boot a lot if only to see if all your bootscripts and modifications stick..)

> But now that Gentoo has a live 64bit version out (for about 6 day or so)

The old tech notes mention a live CD from August. I suppose that wasn't the first one, but there was amd64 support in gentoo for some time (at least longer than 6 days).

What you probably mean is the amd64 2004.0 release. But who cares about releases?

> is it worth to buy an amd64 now or is it still too expensive
> compared to a similar p4?

I just bought an Athlon64 3200 based system for peanuts. The prices are much lower than a comparable P4 in my experience.

The system runs like a dream with 32-bit code, I'm currently figuring out which 64-bit distribution to jump to (probably Fedora once it's stable).

Duncan