>From: "Michael E. Webster" <mwebster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> >To: fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx >Not having any experience whatsoever with either 64-bit processor, my >question is whether anyone has been able to get FC2 installed / working >with these. Oh yeah, and is it stable? > Micheal -- I am running FC2 on two amd64 machines, one at work and one at home, and I am satisfied with the results. The machines have the ASUS SK8V motherboard and the AMD 64 fx-53 processor. The SATA hard drives worked automatically (WD 740 10K Raptor). I had to do the usual sort of fiddling I expect with a development OS and brand-new hardware. The NVIDIA driver I needed was not available yet when I bought the machine (although I could have made do with the included 2D driver which worked out of the box); once installed it has has worked flawlessly now for about a month. The network (built-in gigabit ethernet) was not recognized immediately but was recognized and worked great once I disabled a file mentioned in the release notes. I like window maker rather than gnome or kde, and it compiled up immediately. The wonderful statistical language R compiled immediately and thanks to the larger address space can perform large vector operations in core blazingly fast. As usual, multimedia is an issue, but the helix realplayer 10 is good as is mozplugger. The processor is capable of running 32-bit programs but there are some software limitations in FC2. This is handy if you want to use a plug-in that has proprietary source (or some source in 32-bit binary) and is only available in 32-bit format. I use the 32-bit firefox browser to be compatible with 32-bit plugins. Some require a bit of fiddling, the mozilla plug-ins page is a lot of help (but not always enough and there is no mention of the 32-bit vs 64-bit issue). The main reason 32-bit programs fail is because of missing shared libraries. Sometimes this can be fixed by installing the 32-bit version manually, which is just like installing legacy libraries for old programs. However, in other cases the 32-bit and 64-bit versions have shared files so they cannot both be installed at once. This is not usually a problem for libraries themselves (32-bit versions in /etc/X11R6/lib and 64-bit versions in /etc/X11R6/lib) but some common libraries have associated configuration files in /etc. Unfortunately, a lot of these conflicted shared libraries (e.g. libpixbuf.so) are commonly used in the X-windows programs that are only available in 32-bit. For my purposes this is not a problem (the only capability I wanted that I could not get was display of recent Quicktime movies, not a big deal for me). Libtool is good about supporting the two architectures and is smart about finding shared libraries; some small packages people have posted without the full ./configure - make - autoconf etc. system require fiddling or I could not get running. As I mentioned at the outset, I am overall very happy. Once installed, the system has not crashed. I hope this helps. -- Phil PS You may want to have a look at the Fedora Core 2 for x86_64 Release FAQ at http://www.linuxtx.org/amd64faq.html
