Re: strategy for setting up an AMD64 system
On Wed, Nov 24, 2004 at 04:59:33AM -0600, Hank Barta wrote:
[snip]
> 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.
I think longterm having only a small 32bit chroot for the few missing
programs would be ideal since 64bit is probably what you really want to
have as the primary system.
[snip]
> 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.)
Opteron is rather pricy. It seems AMD considers socket 939 to be the
higher end (since it has dual channel memory and hence 4 dimm support at
full ram speed) and socket 754 low end (semptron will probably mostly go
there if not only there, and it is single channel memory and hence only
2 dimm at full speed or 3 dimm at reduced memory speed). Sure socket
939 costs a little more for the board, but the cpus don't seem to cost
much more when you consider they are faster chips in general. Socket
940 does cost more, as does the buffered ram it requries (which allows
way more dimms per cpu), and the cpus cost more too.
I hope to get a socket 939 system myself in the next few months,
although I will personally wait for PCIe boards to come out, possibly
with the nforce4 chipset, and maybe even dual PCIe graphics slots, just
in case I can ever justify two nvidia cards. :)
> 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.)
Can't think of anything better to use. :)
Len Sorensen
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