strategy for setting up an AMD64 system
I'm thinking about buying a 64 it system and have some questions.
I've looked at the HOW-TO and see comments about installing 64 bit
directly or installing 32 bit and then installing 64 bit in a chroot.
I'm confident that I can install a 32 bit system with no more
difficulties than getting drivers for my particular hardware (more on
that later.) But if the 64 bit stuff is reasonably solid, I'd prefer
to go that route. My concern is winding up with a working system. (And
hopefully without excessive tweaking.)
My second concern is that I be able to run 32 bit apps for which no 64
bit counterparts exist.
It looks like there are two current strategies:
- Install a 64 bit system followed by a 32 bit system in a chroot.
- Install a 32 but system followed by a 64 bit system also in a chroot.
The latter would seem to provide the most likely scenario for a
successful install. At least I should be able to get the 32 bit system
up and running. I've been doing that for years with Debian.
Is there a modification of the latter scenario whereby I run 32 bit
install from the 64 bit system in a chrooted environment chrooted from
the 64 bit install?? It seems to me that that would provide the high
probability of success while providing the capability to run 32 bit
apps from the 64 bit environment. Or would that require a second 32
bit install? Or is it not even feasible?
As an aside and perhaps not pertinent at this time, is it planned
and/or feasible that someday there will be a 32 bit subsystem
available with the 64 bit environment that doesn't require a separate
install? I'm guessing that to meet dependencies, I would need a lot of
redundant 32 bit software installed to be able to run a mixed 32/64
bit system.
My other questions revolve around motherboards. At present I lean
toward a socket 939 board and it seems like a lot of them have
embedded LAN, IEEE-1394, sound and even RAID controllers. I've done
some googling but not really been able to determine which boards have
64 bit support for most or all of the embedded peripherals. (I don't
really care about the built in Winmodem. ;) At a minimum I'd like to
avoid anything that is likely to never have a driver due to current
vendor disclosure policies. I'd like to hear recommendations for
particular boards that are either known to work well (or not.) I'll
also listen arguments to consider other socket type AMD 64 bit
processors. Select Opteron and allow for the possibility to add a
second processor? (Though this is probably stretching the charter of
this list a bit.)
Finally, I'll even listen to arguments to use something besides
Debian. That's my first choice because I've used it for years and I'm
really happy with the ease of keeping an installation up to date. I
thought that experimenting with 64 bits and a different distro was
taking a pretty big bite. Ubuntu seems like a logical alternative, but
I don't know if it will eventually be feasible to migrate to Debian.
(And perhaps it won't be necessary.)
many thanks for your help.
hank
--
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Beautiful Sunny Winfield
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