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x86-64 Slackware Clone Released
Rob_Ogilvie points out that another distribution for x86-64 (AKA AMD64) has been released: "This time it's Slamd64. Slamd64 10.1 is based off Slackware 10.1. Developer Fred Emmott ported Slackware to AMD64 in his spare time, trying to keep the distribution as close to Slackware proper as possible (even keeping binary compatibility for many existing packages). Finally x86-64 users have some real viable choices out there!"
As an AMD-64 user, I couldn't wait for this to happen. Definately going to try it out right now.
-Countach44
The past few weeks have been fantastic for PC operating system developments. Between the new Fedora release, this, the release of open source Solaris, the release of FreeBSD 5.4, Mac OS X on Intel machines, and the upcoming release of BeOS, things have really been happening at an amazing pace. We are truly coming up to a time of great innovation and change in the PC desktop/workstation landscape.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I've had AMD64 Gentoo running for over a year.
I've been waiting for something like this. I use Slackware V10.1 and have been for years. I'll finally be able to pickup my AMD64 and run a real Linux. 8)
Debian on AMD64
Call it "x22 Slackware".
Why is this news? Don't the big ones (SuSE, Fedora, Gentoo, etc) already support AMD64? I think SuSE 9.3 supports both AMD64 and EM64T (Intel's version of the 64 bit arch).
I'm not trying to troll, I'm just wondering if I'm missing something? I don't know much about 64 bit.
cant forget about the relese of debian gnu/linux 3.1 finally!
Noone writes jokes in base 13!
Oh my, of course! Indeed, the list just keeps growing. So many PC operating system developments have happened during these past few weeks that one even forgets some of the most major events!
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
BEOS ?
You do know that Slack is one of the first distros ever. Now granted in the year of our Lord 2000 and 5 Slack tends to be for people who already run Slack but they do tend to be some of the best and brightest around. This is simply a new arch not a new distro.
And yeah there are a few great ones. Two to be exact Debian and Slack. Almost all of the mediocre ones are built off of Dabian.
So your point was supposed to be?
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
C'mon now. This is a rather harsh generalization. (Or troll)
We all should know by now that the hundreds of available linux distros are the direct product of people wanting to do it their way. Want a source based distro? Sure! Go for it. CD based LiveCD distro? The tools are there. Have a ball! Like a distro, but want to make a change that the maintainers won't support? You can do it yourself.
Point is, you can't possibly fit everyone's vision in to "a few great" distros.
Great news indeed.
Well done, even the site looks like slackware.com
I've always liked slackware because it is small and simple.
I've been using slack since 1995, then I tried all the other distros but I always go back to slack when I want something simple to build from: the CD is quick to get you to shell where you can chroot, the installation is quick and takes the minimum amount of space (why would you need >500MB for bash + ls?!! Fedora anyone?), etc
It will definitely have a place on my x86064 systems - if not as the main system, as a backup at least. Good work!
Only regret: where's the torrent? the mirrors aren't up to date yet..
TODO: 753) write sig.
BeOS in the form of yellowTAB Zeta.
0 3&tid=87&tid=190
See:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/14/01192
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
This is good, but it's not like there was no choice for x86_64 before. Debian, (K)Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, Mandriva all have 64 bit versions out.
Yeah but will it run on a Mac?
</fastforward>
So many kernels, just the one GNU/Emacs...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I'd say that the odds are something like:
80% for Linux
10% for BSD
5% for HURD
4% for decompiled NT kernel
1% for OpenSolaris
One has to read the source code to know for sure what it is running.
In case you hadn't heard, AMD64 distros have been abailable for a while now. Want something Debian-based? Try Ubuntu Hoary, which has been out for several months now.
ISO for AMD64
It's because school is out now, I guess.
I need a sig.
All recommendations I've seen are to hold off using WinXP 64 and wait until Longhorn.
On the conpiracy theory side... Microsoft's slow adoption may strictly be at the bequest of Intel (who know they don't really have anything that can compete with AMD right now).
By delaying "good" support for 64bit, Microsoft is actually helping Intel in making sure the 64bit revolution doesn't take off in a massive way... gives Intel more time to catch up. Most Intel shops are pure Microsoft shops (e.g. Dell.. well.. Dell does give Linux some lip service, but it's just a marketing thing).
Heh. Nice try cockface, nice try.
Linux currently scales far better on machines with multiple processors and >4GB RAM, for one. The hardware support is wider, the user-base is greater.
Looks like if anyone needs catching up, it's you.
Just because someone asks why this is news? Seriously, this is adding one more distro among how many? Looks like a bunch of goofballs out there taking offense at someone questioning slashdot.
We've been having problems with rsync timeouts and I've not been able to get hold of the admin of the primary mirror. ftp.heanet.ie/pub/slamd64/ contains the .xdelta files for final compared to RC4 - full isos should have finished in a few hours. Sorry for the delay.
Finally x86-64 users have some real viable choices out there!
Viable? In what sense is a one-man fork of what is essentially a one-man operating system viable?
For historical reasons Slackware has a special place in the hearts of many in the Linux community, granted. And it may even be a decent choice for enthusiasts and roll-your-own professionals. But any serious enterprise would be beyond foolish to entrust their IT center to an OS developed, packaged and supported entirely at the whim of just a couple of guys with no real infrastructure behind them. One of whom has had some bizarre health problems of late, probably immune system related (no slight intended to Patrick).
The word you're looking for is "interesting" or maybe "fun," not viable.
There is also the fact that 64bit preforms slower in many cases than 32bit. Add that to the fact that there were a great deal of 32bit shortcuts built into code that break if you recompile for 64bit and you suddenly lose a lot of software on 64 bit. My thoughts are unless you need massive amounts of memory or you need to do calculations on huge numbers stick with 32bit until you can't any more.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Why is this news?
Well, it's slackware working in another architecture
Why not Debian/*buntu/Fedora/yadda?
I don't like [package] management getting in my way, that's why.
It's outdated!
Get some fresh source or search slackware-current or linuxpackages
If I wanted to compile I'd get gentoo!
Your choice.
I see 57005 people
I've been running SuSe Linux Enterprise Server for x86-64 on production servers for several months now. Backwards compatibility with 32-bit apps has been flawless so far.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
You could also look at Gentoo as well, which has had 64 bit compatibility for a while. Course who'd want to look there for a distro who makes you compile things *gasp*
Looking at the build scripts, you realize that x86_64 support isn't exactly a gargantuan effort. Half of the packages even look at an environment variable to know when not to pass -march to gcc. I suspect that the only reason that Patrick himself hasn't rolled out binaries is because he doesn't have the hardware to test it.
32 bit userland code can run on amd64 anyway.
the two real issues are drivers and 16 bit userland code (which there is still quite a bit of sloshing around: i wan't to play microsoft tetris and chips challange damnit).
as for the speed argument remember that amd64 has other changes. Most importantly it has far more general perpose registers for the compilers to use. so even in code that doesn't gain anything from the 64 bitness there can still be a speedup (doubtless you can find some benchmark thats slower you always can).
also i seem to remember that i386 took some time to be fully taken advantage of. why is it worrying that its taking amd64 a while.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
This is essential for Linux. I have had an AMD Athlon 64 bit machine for about one year now. Having Mandrake, Suse and Red Hat support now for the same time; It's wonderful to see the elegance of Slackware for the x86_64 platform. Slackware was my first distro and I think using Slackware teaches one a LOT about Linux and how everything works.
Slackware in minimalist, quick and efficient if you want to get work done I highly recommend this project to our x86_64 toting friends. Congrats!
"Finally ... some real viable choices"? Come on, lots of different linux distros and all three BSDs have had AMD64 support for quite some time now. How much more blatent can you make a troll, and still get your "story" accepted?
I have been helping out a friend who have a small company selling computers and equipment, and to me it looks like 2 out of 10 computers sold are AMD64s. Much the same as for P4's, the AMD's are actually slightly ahead. The rest of the systems sold are various AMD Semprons, mainly the 2500+ on motherboards with on-board graphics. Looks like cheap are what most people want.
I thought GNU/Emacs was an operating system! :-)
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
That's not a clone of Slack 10.1, it's an officially sanctionned port.
Furthermore, Slack 10.1 will run just fine on AMD64, because AMD64, and ia64 as well, are backwards compatible and will run code intended for 32-bit processors. The difference is that the code in slamd64 is optimized for Athlon64/Opteron, a feat which is entirely doable by anybody who knows how to compile a kernel and their own software.
Don't get me wrong. It's a great boon to people who prefer Slack and run AMD64, but that only comes in saving them the time to compile their own, but it's by no means the great saviour: I've been running Slack 10.1 on my Athlon64-based server for a while, and all I had to do was compile a kernel and recompile Apache/PHP/MySQL/Sendmail/UW-IMAP. Technically, I didn't even have to recompile those, either....
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
I recently built three 2500+ Semprons on motherboards with built in graphics for a business. They were cheap, didn't need large cooling systems, and 64-bit wasn't something this company needed. Heck, they have a saw that uses an 8-bit processor. 32 bits is plenty for most people save the ultra high end.
the two real issues are drivers and 16 bit userland code
It is not the drivers, it is the bloody applications hard coded to the OS versions. I've got a AMD64 system with a handful of HDD's for testing software. Just got done giving the first rounds of testing with Win2003-64 (still beta I think) and the GA version of WinXp-64. Since I am using an Nforce4 mainboard and Nvidia video card, I've got drivers for all of the on-board kit of a fully loaded box. The Adaptec controllers got picked up by the OS as well.
The real fun started when I started trying to run applications. Being clever, Microsoft thought to default the 'program files' to something like 'program files (64-bit)'. The parenthesis caused several installers (take steam for instance) to give grief. Rational Application Developer had all sorts of trouble trying to spin up, and the DVD burning software was a total loss. I've got a free copy, and I won't mess with it again for a few months.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
I've been using Fedora (and previously Redhat AS3) on my Opterons basically since they were supported. Save some bugs in past releases of gcc, I've never had any problems. It runs wonderfully.
All my x86 machines also run Fedora, so I basically have the same setup on all my architectures. Really easy to maintain.
Indeed -- only Windows is nowhere to be seen. ;-)
The only thing it lacks is a good text editor.
My first question is "Do common 32bit binaries Just Work?". Anyone wishing to run 32 bit binary software would best stay clear of Debians port, as it has no real support for "multi-arch". This translates into ugly chroot hacks to get Realplayer, flash, and other binary-only apps working.
I ended up dumping it for Gentoo, which has decent emulation support. Gentoo problem is that many pacakges are marked as unstable for the ADM64, or worse have no support at all. (Not to mention the fact that I think building every package from source is a bit first-year)
Ubuntu has support that seems somewhat inbetween, it's missing libraries needed to run some gtk2 apps, I didn't try and debug it too much, since I was using the live-dvd (which is a great idea).
Were getting there.
--
Mu
There is also the fact that 64bit preforms slower in many cases than 32bit.
This just isn't the case for us, when real-life tools are run by our engineers. In fact, many see speed bumps (same exact boxes, older rh73 on some vs sles9) when run on the 64bit hosts. I'm sure 2.6 kernel helps but can't explain it all.
Not to mention that things built 64bit have access to more registers so tend to get a bit of a boost because of that.
I'm actually running Win x64 at home now.. on my opteron gaming box. Seems fine so far. Only had one app that refused to install yet (mysonic DVD software for tivo show burns). Games are fine, FarCry 64bit looks nicer.. When I boot into linux, it runs fine.
I think Intel really is trying to slow the adoption as much as they can since AMD is going 64bit across the board already, and Intel is still only selling EM64T on the high-end.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
Being clever, Microsoft thought to default the 'program files' to something like 'program files (64-bit)'.
ALmost.. program files is program files just like before, for 64bit code. 32bit programs go into "Program Files (x86)" Yes... it's stupid.
I just change it in the install wizard whenever I install anything.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
I run SuSE 9.2 Pro on an AMD64 - Acrobat's not a problem, but there's no 64 bit version of Flash.
You can kind of get around that by installing a 32 bit version of your browser, with appropriate 32 bit plugins (Flash, Java mainly) and fire that up when you need those plugins, but it's definitely an annoyance.
Yes, there are. I'm looking forward to the idea of Microsoft having viable competetion from several vendors for desktop and workstation PCs. When Linux started making inroads into the desktop, albeit small ones, Microsoft released it's first relatively stable OS, XP, shortly thereafter. It's amazing what a little bit of competition will do for your average behemoth.
The competition will do them a world of good, and that will do us all a world of good. We could potentially see some extreme innovation and advancement in the PC world over the next five years since it will (hopefully) become more and more competative as alternate OS's become more of a viable option to the common enduser.
The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
OUCH. That's harsh. You must have never been in the trenches with a need to type pages after pages with Vi.
"Microsoft's slow adoption may strictly be at the bequest of Intel (who know they don't really have anything that can compete with AMD right now)."
Except that AMD outperforming Intel's offering has become old news. Everybody who's into building PCs knows that AMD's policy is to name their chips with numbers based not on the chips frequency but on the frequency of the equivalent Intel chip, and it's only a matter of time before word of AMD's performance against Intel starts to trickle down to the general masses. It's going to take some sort of magic wand on the part of Intel to fix that one now, and so far it doesn't seem Itanium is that magic wand (especially when AMD beat them to the punch).
Besides, I don't see Microsoft being particularly maried to Intel at the moment, especially if Intel is getting buddy-buddy with the creators of OSX. So long as most of Microsoft's customers (the ones that refer to the computer case as the "hard drive") don't care about what's running all that nifty Windows software, there's no real reason for Microsoft themselves to care. There's no advantage to sucking up more to one processor manufacturer over another, especially when you look at the consequences of making the wrong bet.
OTOH, the Microsoft documentation I've seen says that WinServ2k3 Enterprise can support twice as much ram on an Itanium box as a 32-bit box, but no mention of AMD64. Maybe I haven't seen everything, but it seems odd that they've latched on to the product name "Itanium" here instead of AMD64 or the older x64 (which they referred to in the name of the 64-bit version of XP).
Nope, Linux or nothing.
Microsoft has nothing to sell in the x86 market, that's all. If ISV's were willing to port all of their applications to XP64 then I'm sure people would use it. As is they have an operating system with little or no app's that run on it
That's why they can't sell it, and Ironically that's what I can't seem to find out about Slamd64. Where's the package list??
once more into the breach
i rememeber that the 64-bit fedora was avaiable some time in last year. even i like slackware more, but it's obviously that slackware's influence is not as much as fedora's or debian's.
so why not *just* use a 32 bit browser if you need flash, and all your other proggies 64 bit?
if i wanted to build a computer with an athlon 64 processor, specifically to run some sort of x86-64 compatible linux, what motherboard, video card, sound card, etc should i get to ensure maximum compatibility?
I wonder how many people realize that 64 bit equals worse desktop performance. Suddenly all your apps use up a bunch more memory because the pointers just got bigger, and amd64 instructions are bigger. Relatively worse L2 cache hit rates and more data to pull off of the disk means that running 64 bit will slow you down.
Of course, if you want to allocate more than several GB (depending on OS, flavor, etc...) in a single address space, then you need 64 bit.
I've run Ubuntu for AMD64 which follows the Debian AMD64 branch/guidelines, and it is just too damn hard to get 32 bit stuff running. So that means no flash or other 32 bit binaries. This is just too annoying.
I want a 64 bit optimised kernel, etc, but I want to be able to seemlessly run 32 bit applications. Can't SOMEBODY in the Linux world provide this??? So I'm left with pure 32bit distributions because it is less hassle.
Grats Fred, I know you have been working on this a long time, glad to see its materialized for you.
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
Point is, you can't possibly fit everyone's vision in to "a few great" distros.
Except for T2 maybe? http://www.t2-project.org/index.html
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
You might still try the libflash for Linux, which covers a good part of Flash, (but not fscommand for instance).
I wonder how many people realize that 64 bit equals worse desktop performance
which is why everyone multilibs 32/64.
Not having native flash binaries is currently the greatest single benefit of the platform.
No, not really. They have some bulk of fixes today, against virals, blabla, blabla, and so on :)
Nice troll, troll.
any serious enterprise would be beyond foolish to entrust their IT center to an OS developed, packaged and supported entirely at the whim of just a couple of guys with no real infrastructure behind them
Are you talking about Slackware, or Linux in general here?
Wow, I beat Slack by a week with my homebrew "distro". If you want an engaging puzzle, try building your own install kit by hand from bits you have lying around on a working system. (For extra points try it with no network and the only removable storage being on USB.)
If you are speaking of writing pages and pages of prose... then use the right tool for the right job.
Now if you're talking about code (or poetry, if that's your bag), where you don't go on for ages without a carriage return, vi is great.
I haven't used 64bit XP but you're giving the wrong people (Microsoft) a hard time in this case. "Program Files (x86)" is a perfectly valid file name and has been for years. You really should be getting on the case of the people who wrote the software that can't handle that file name. Mike ps I do think it's an odd decision of Microsoft's to separate out 64bit software from 32bit software. It's not like you could use that information to copy the program to a 32bit Windows machine (stupid registry!)
(reformatted, oops I should have used preview!)
I haven't used 64bit XP but you're giving the wrong people (Microsoft) a hard time in this case. "Program Files (x86)" is a perfectly valid file name and has been for years.
You really should be getting on the case of the people who wrote the software that can't handle that file name.
Mike
ps I do think it's an odd decision of Microsoft's to separate out 64bit software from 32bit software. It's not like you could use that information to copy the program to a 32bit Windows machine (stupid registry!)
haha, slackware
1996 called it wants its distro back
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
You can compile (and people frequently do) all the most important elements of any FOSS OS - kernerl etc. There is absolutely no benefit if you know what to tweek. I do enjoy picking up flame points however. I need to lower my slarma!
Yay!! Now I can slack it up on my new AMD64 box! No more of this FC crap. Let the good times roll.
There have been two incidents recently which have really soured me on Gentoo, and I will probably migrate my opteron system to slamd64 soon.
/usr/lib library to /bin/ls. I think it was the console mouse (gm?) routines; everything had been ok, until some emerge -sync changed the ebuild. I had to explicitly disable it to fix te problem. The very idea that any boot partition command would link to a non-boot library ought to send shivers down any UNIX user's spine. There is no excuse for this. No matter what USE flags were set, or what packages were merged, no boot command should ever be linked against anything not on the boot partition. This was not some manually added command or library. This was completely the result of a Gentoo screwup.
... I ran slackware for years, but had to switch for the opteron machine. Gentoo has a lot of nice features, and thankfully does not have shadow config files, and follows traditional UNIX practices nicely, but I cannot excuse these two cockups.
One, someone added a
Two, an update of LVM created a new lib, version 1.01, and deleted the 1.00 lib, without relinking everything that was linked against the 1.00 lib. The next boot failed. Luckily, a symlink from 1.01 to 1.00 fixed it well enough to boot and re-emerge the orphaned command. Another horror for anyone who has used UNIX for more than a few months.
There is no excuse for these two incidents. When I say amateur, I mean it in the derogatory sense. Any system which lets novices screw up basics like this is not ready for prime time. I have been too busy to investigate slamd64, but it is on my list
Infuriate left and right
I downloaded all four ISOs (for 10.1R4) a few days ago and it was SLOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWW.
I'd gladly run a torrent if someone has a tracker set up...
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
I pay for a subscription from Slackware! Just go to the Slackware store.
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
The good ones will rise to the top and other will just be left behind.
Um, that's not always true...
VHS vs. Beta
C-Quam Vs. Khan
-and-
Microsoft
Are all examples inferior products rising to the top.
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
My discussion was based on perf tests that we ran on our product. The 32bit compile of the code was faster than the 64bit compile of the same code on the same 64bit machine.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
> Finally x86-64 users have some real viable choices out there!
Yeah, finally! All you people that run more than 4GB RAM now have more choices! What's that, you don't have more than 4GB of RAM? Why are you running 64-bit then? You mean you'd purposefully trade stability and number of available applications for being able to say you run 64-bit and no other good reason whatsoever? Oh, you're "future-proofing" yourself? Riiiight.. Nevermind, sorry I asked, stupid me...
Must-not-watch TV!
90% of high server sales, where the higher margins are... are done on Intel. AMD has just started making inroads into the datacenter (it's growing at a good pace, but still definitely the much, much, much smaller of the two).
Microsoft is VERY married to Intel. The Apple deal is big.. but nothing in comparison size wise to Microsoft+Intel.
Actually, Itaniums support more memory than you or I can imagine (32TB or more)... naturally, it means is supports more memory than is actually practical, unless somebody figues out how to access racks of memory directly.
AMD64 (especially Opteron) is a better design in that it preserves the large software base and has a could basis for large numbers of CPUs with less glue logic than Intel (even if it can't handle the large ammounts of memory).
Itanium is not OP code compatible (1st gen Itaniums had a 486 on core.. that was their soln!)... newer ones assume you'll do software emulation for x86. Itanium architecture is actually called ia64, old Intel 32-bit is ia32. AMD is often referred to as x86_64 (to avoid some confusion). Intel's "attempt" at 64bit on top of the older 32bit is EM64T (and although there are some differences... most people just work thru the exceptions and call it all x86_64).
Intel and AMD's contractual cross licensing allows Intel to do this EM64T. Ah the pains of being the little guy sometimes comes back to bite you when you are the one that is innovating in new tech.