Fedora Core for the AMD64 installation is exactly the same as the x86 installation (at least from my last install of Fedora Core 1 on my AMD XP machine). No problems were encountered during the install, and unlike TurboLinux and Suse (recall Suse needed the noapic option also) I did not need to pass any special kernel parameters to get it to boot into the install. Again, if you have installed Fedora Core for x86 machines, this installation is the same. Gnome and KDE were both available for installation, although I left it defaulted. I note that TurboLinux does KDE only, and Suse defaults to KDE also. After install was complete the machine rebooted and came up with out problems. As mentioned before, Fedora does a graphical loading (not only grub, but from them on out), but details are available if you hit the "details" button. Unlike TurboLinux, but just like all the other distributions, I set the display for 1280x960 and that resolution worked fine after logging out and then logging back in.
Like most other distributions, Fedora is so far doing the dual /lib and /lib64 setup so that software compiled on 32 bit machines is supported (and yes, Kernel support for 32 bit binaries is on out of the box). I did find a few small binaries from my 32 bit machine that would not run, but they needed a not so obscure library that was not installed. This is not a huge problem to overcome and in fact searching for a pre-built Fedora rpm turned up one that worked fine (in fact, one could copy the rpm from the 32 bit Fedora). All of the installed programs that I tried worked, and I would guess that some are still in 32 bit mode (as seen on Gentoo, etc). However, like Suse and TurboLinux, I did not run across any software installed out of the box that did not work. From an average desktop users point of view, there is no visible difference between Fedora Core for x86 and the AMD64 version, with the exception of the price of the hardware.
Gentoo for AMD64
Gentoo has made many strides since my last article, X has a few window managers to choose from, and in fact I have loaded KDE without a problem, after loading and using Enlightenment until KDE was done. There were several applications which I tried to install during the last article which were not ready for the AMD64 (masked in Gentoo portage speak). Of course one can try their luck and emerge them anyway, but most of the time I wait until the Gentoo team gives it the O.K. I will not rant on and on about Gentoo, but wanted to mention that they are moving ahead with many apps being ported, window managers and kernels. I would like to point out at this time that they are the only one I have tested that is (as of this writing) using the 2.6 series of kernels.
Which brings us to: The Kernel.
I do not wish to get into an argument about the kernel version used with these distributions, as there has been much discussion on the net about which one is better now, and which one should be used. The 2.4.x kernel series is of course the second to latest stable release, and is considered by many to be _the_ stable kernel, with 2.6.x only having been out a short while. The 2.6.x kernel, being more recent, does have many advantages over the 2.4.x series in terms of Opteron support. Specifically, it supports the Opteron directly, and it seems to overcome many of the problems associated with peripherals on Opteron motherboards (most probably due to increased Nvidia Nforce support which must be hacked into the 2.4 kernel to work properly). It is my opinion that if you use an Nforce based motherboard (or any for that matter) and you run the Opteron, the 2.6 series is the kernel of choice. It also seems to run faster in many situations on the Opteron (again, most likely due to the increases in performance that have been incorporated into the kernel).
To summarize:
TurboLinux claims to have had Opteron support the longest, and it does seem polished, but it does have a few oddities to it (disk install problems, etc) but again, most of these have been fixed with the update CD. Gentoo is moving right along with porting, they now have window managers (for those interested) and they are using the 2.6 kernel on the live CDs. Fedora Core is still beta, but it has never given me any problems (it is the desktop OS of choice on my Opteron) and everything works. I did do some small, highly debatable benchmarking on these different distributions, but I stronly recommend that if you want to use the Opteron for any CPU intensive task, benchmarking of the application to be used should be performed.
On a lighter note, Opteron owners now have plenty of choices and the price of the hardware is coming down to boot. The VLSI software[1] I use compiled on them fine and in fact the 32bit binaries copied from my AMD Athlon system worked directly (with the exception of Fedora which I had to add a few 32 bit libs for). For the price of a home built PC one can get a 64 bit CPU and have a 64 OS running on it.
- "Linux on Opteron, Page 1/3"
- "Linux on Opteron, Page 2/3"
- "Linux on Opteron, Page 3/3"
