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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!"
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.
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.
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
What about the 64-Bit version of Windows XP?
Crap for drivers. Only been running an AMD64 for a few weeks now, so I've yet to try out the flavors of linux for it, but only ran XP64 for about an hour before formatting the drive. Doesn't do much good to run 64bit OS if you can't talk to your printer and you have to use hacked up inf files to get the on board NIC working.
Give it a year or so to get some freak'n driver support and then give it a shot. Till then, stick with XP pro or Linux.
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
I bought my beast from Micronux:
http://www.micronux.com/
This model:
here
It's a good system and it came with CentOS4 for x86_64 which I gave a few days before wiping and installing x86_64 gentoo.
I've since bought an additional GB of memory to dedicate to various vmware machines for envrionment testing and some work-specific windows stuff.
The only issues I've had with an all x86_64 system has been related to codeweavers and transgaming stuff. Oh and some issues with Flash. I spend most of time browsing with a native compiled firefox version and switching to firefox-bin under multilib when I need the non-64bit plugins.
I even did my first stage one install in a LONG time (I normally do a stage 2 on installs for obvious time reasons) just to see how it would perform and even with just the 1GB of ram at the time, I was done in a couple of hours and running X. The system really does scream. FYI, PCI-Express in SLI mode is non-existant under linux right now but dual-head works fine.
Micronux is a solid company and I plan on buying again from them in the future.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"