[ale] Ubuntu for AMD64

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sun, 2007-05-06 at 11:48 -0400, runman wrote:

> Has anyone installed and used/is using the Ubuntu version for AMD64 ??
> It
> seems like a little under-developed as compared to Suse for example.
> I am
> trying to find a distro that works really well on a dual Opteron
> computer
> and that will dual boot with Windows 2000.  I have used Suse for this
> several versions ago but am not familiar with OpenSuse.
> 
> Thanks for any comments, hints, recollections, etc. 


I've been using the AMD64 version since I bought my HP Slimline machine,
which is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 box.  It is working out really well for me,
the only real problem is binary 32-bit browser plugins, but that can be
fixed with some additional software acting as an intermediary between
the browser and the plugin itself.  Also, I don't know if this is an
issue on i386 builds of Ubuntu, but KVM worked somewhat poorly until I
flipped a switch in the kernel to enable some RTC emulation stuff stuff
(this required a kernel rebuild).  Now, I am using KVM to run WinXP for
my math homework, and it feels like it is working close enough to
real-time without me being able to perceive much of a difference.
That's pretty extraordinary.

I do know that there seem to be some memory leak situations, such as
with GAIM, but I don't know if that is 64-bit specific.  There is also
another (possibly related?) crash in GAIM, but I also do not know if
that is 64-bit specific as I've not tried it in a 32-bit environment.

Everything else seems to be fine, and I use it exclusively.  32-bit Wine
works on it if you build it on your own, and Cedega works on it
out-of-the-box, if you need to use that, as well.  I have so far used
Wine for one rather CPU-intensive application that doesn't seem to be
available for Linux-based systems.

The usual bells and whistles (CD/DVD burning, wireless networking, etc.)
also work as expected, with the caveat that (to my knowledge) you cannot
use 32-bit NDIS drivers on the 64-bit system.  I don't know if there is
something that you can do to work around that or not, but once
ndiswrapper supports Windows Vista drivers, it shouldn't be a problem--
there are both x86 and x64 drivers for everything that I have seen that
has a Vista driver thus far.

    Hope that is helpful,
    Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
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