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He doesn't get credited at www.slackware.com.

Slamd64 provided us with a good Slackware port to AMD64 while Pat was busy with IBM/390 ports.

IIRC it is maintained by Fred Emmott. Why no credit/cooperation??? Lacking expanation, I'm unhappy.

http://www.slamd64.com/

Just give the maintainers a little while to catch up, but SlamD64 does include 32-bit support so you can install most normal 32-bit slackware packages if you need to.

I've been running Slackware since 1995 (initially on a 486). Last year I got an Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz) and later upgraded it to a Athlon 64 X2 5200+.

I decided to give SLAMD64 a try. It's straight Slackware compiled for AMD64/Intel EM64T. Although I haven't done any serious benchmarks, my SETI@Home floating-point measured performance went up 55% when I installed the 64-bit client. The system is using memory more efficiently too (read up on the problems 32-bit OSes have with RAM of 1GB and above).

Who cares. most people have already moved to a 64bit distro and the rest will in the next thirty years.
If for some reason your still using a 32bit distro I would suggest checking out slamd64 its a 64bit version of slackware.

I have configured my new box similarly (Posted a tiny HOWTO here: http://forums.slamd64.com/viewtopic.php?t=1060&highlight=nixer )

Using hdparm, one disk gives 70 MB/s, the RAID5 array gives 140 MB/s (3 disks) ... I wonder how I'll get the max of 384 MB/s (3 Gbps)

Slackware Slamd64 has had support for AMD64 for a while now and it works just fine, no driver problems or stability problems on the Linux side. On the Windows XP64 side things aren't as rosy, but not as bad as some people say either. I found drivers for all my hardware, including the graphics card (NV7600), and so the OS is functioning very well. Some games don't run, but all the ones I play do. Half Life 2 (64bit version), HL2E1, Sims 2, Flight Simulator 9 and X, all Civilization versions and CTP, Fallout 1 (F2 doesn't work), GTA 3 and SA, all work great.

If you are a programmer, you will definitely want to get on x86_64. You get twice (!) as many general purpose registers, twice as many SSE registers, and a much cleaner ABI with most things passed in registers instead of the stack. You also will no longer be using the 387 FPU, as the ABI supports doing pretty much everything through SSE, unlike the 32bit ABI that required returning floats in an FPU register. This should greatly reduce your EMMS headaches. Finally having native 64-bit types rocks! The premature optimization nut in you will crack with joy, I guarantee it.

What isn't pointed out by this review is that Slackware version the reviewer installed is still a 32bit version. The computer he installed it on is an AMD64. Personally, I would have found the review much more helpful if it had addressed the 64bit issues that Slackware has#151;which is what most new workstations and servers have under the hood.

There is an 64bit port of Slackware out there, Slamd64. Unfortunately, it has no where near the stability of Slackware current. Just keeping the installer from crashing can be a huge headache. I ran into this first hand after purchasing an AMD64 server. It's hard to give Slackware a glowing review until the 64bit port is up to par.

You need Slamd64 the 64 bit slackware dist. Get the current, it's basicly 10.2.

http://www.slamd64.com/

    PenGun
  Do What Now ??? ... Standards and Practices !

You can also try SlAMD64, a Slackware-based distro compiled for AMD64. They just updated for Slackware 10.2.

slamd64 has been released with many quite similar changes. What a coincidence, 'eh? Grab it now if your CPU is of the x86-64 persuation.

slamd64 has been released with many quite similar changes. What a coincidence, 'eh? Grab it now if your CPU is of the x86-64 persuation.

Not just programs stop working on upgrade, but hardware too. My 1.4Ghz t-bird (or camp stove, as I like to call it) finally died a nasty heat death last month. I bought an Athlon64 + mb to replace it, and loaded XP64. My $330 (at the time of purchase 3 years ago) Geforce 4 ti4600 is not supported by the 64-bit version of the windows drivers. You can't find a version, anywhere, that works with it by default. I eventually got it working by editing the model and version string the installer was looking for, but upgrading the defacto PC OS shouldn't cause a expensive, fairly recently purchased piece of hardware to stop functioning! Expecially one that works just fine with the linux nvidia drivers in 64-bit mode (in Slamd64-current thank you very much).

Every time I try a new distribution (this time, i installed Ubuntu last month) I always just want to go back to Slackware. However, when I left as a user of Slackware it didn't have a AMD64 port, but it was under development. Slackware is just simple and understandable. It has a package system if you need it, but it's just as easy to install from source and not screw your system into dependency hell. Configurations are in text files which don't have silly front ends that try to do checksums on them to make sure you havn't modified them by hand.

I love slackware. I wish I had time to somehow support the development of the unofficial AMD64 port. looks like it's comming along well (havn't looked in months) slamd64

Ubuntu has been nice however. Years ago i used debian. Ubuntu seems to a great, polished product for desktop users.

Grab a 64-bit Linux distribution. Yet another benefit of opensource is that people can freely recompile to 64-bit. I'm running 64-bit KDE 3.4.0 on my 64-bit Linux 2.6.11 on my Opteron 3000+. It runs WoW under 32-bit Cedega nicely as well (in addition to Starcraft/Diablo, etc). No need to chain yourself to a legacy OS for a few applications you can easily run in Linux :)

I run Slamd64, the x86-64 Slackware.