Going 64-bit
Last Monday I purchased a new PC. The specs are pretty spiffy: its a AMD Athlon 64 3000 (2Ghz) system running on an Asus K8N-E Deluxe motherboard (nForce 3 250Gb based motherboard with SATA and onboard LAN & sound). I decided to try Gentoo Linux with has been with mixed success. Here are some notes:
- SystemRescueCd and KNOPPIX are both great tools for doing system maintaince work. I put my old hard drives in the system and booted into KNOPPIX do copy over the files before there was even any operating system installed. One problem I had, which I’m not sure how it is related, was getting the partioning/formatting of the new SATA drive done. In the end I used the Ubuntu Linux 64-bit install CD to do the partitioning then SysRescCd/KNOPPIX.
- All the various live CDs I’ve used have recognized the SATA drive ok, but the kernel I’ve installed myself doesn’t. I’m not sure if I might have missed a module somewhere. Generally the Asus K8N-E Deluxe/nForce 3 250Gb hardware seems to work well with Linux – better than the Silicon Image SATA RAID controller thats onboard anyway.
- I’ve started reading about how to do Gentoo on AMD64 it seems there are some tricks to get certain applications working. So far problem programs which are easy to get working have been openoffice and firefox/flash. They just have 32 bit binary versions you can install.
- Video might be a bit harder because of the w32 codecs being 32-bit dlls. I personally use Totem, but most of the info online points you to using mplayer and doing a lot of mplayer voodoo magic to watch videos.
Thats all for now… I will try to put some more info up soon.