On Friday 17 February 2006 10:02, Adam Funk wrote: > I'm planning to buy a new home computer soon and am considering Xeon, > Athlon 64 and Opteron 64, but I'm not sure about the relevant Debian > architectures, ia64 and amd64. Which one applies to which of those > processors? > > I'm also concerned about the potential shortage of 64-bit software for > a general-purpose workstation, so I'd like to know what other people > think of this. Will I be setting myself up for a lot of hassle? > Should I just stick with a Pentium 4 for now? > > Thanks, > Adam
Well I can't speak for the other two but I am currently sitting in front of an Athlon 64 machine running the AMD64 port of Debian (Sid flavour). There is no real shortage of software for AMD64 as long as you only use OSS stuff as generally it just needs compiling for 64 bit. There are some exceptions though which you should know about before installing the AMD64 port. At the moment OpenOffice doesn't compile / run as a 64 bit application (well there are some versions floating about but they are still a fair way from entering Sid AFAIK). This means that it has to be run through a chroot which is a pain but not very complicated. If you watch a lot of non-mpeg movies you will also need the chroot to run mplayer with the codec pack. I've never managed to get flash working (no loss there then) and real player can be a problem. Other than that _everything_ I've tried just works on 64 bit. Having said that there is not really any advantage to running the 64 bit port as there isn't any software that makes use of the extra features and the Althon 64 in 32 bit mode is just as fast. The choice is yours, as they say. Hope that helps, Graham -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
