Hup,hup Debian AMD64, Hup, hup
Hi everybody,
just installed Etch yesterday on my AMDx2 and I must say i'm very impressed.
I've been using Gentoo64 since i first bought the computer (before that i was
a very happy and proud debian32 user), and the difference I see is huge.
Debian is SO much faster- and mind you I was the typical "naughty" gentoo guy
that optimizes anything on his path.
I thought I'd say hello to everybody, share my experiences and of course, ask
some questions :)
- It seems to me that Debian has changed somehow its "policy"? One thing I
enjoyed about Gentoo was the immediate availability of new releases, and I
was reluctant to return to Debian, knowing that it takes a lot of time until
a new release hits the repositories (a fact that I respect, seeing the
quality of official deb packages). But a quick check revealed that Etch has
modular X, gcc4 and KDE 3.5.3 to name a few. Wow!
- Since i've seen a similar thread going on, i'll just state that I've chosen
XFS and it seems to be working smooth and fast, faster than other filesystems
i've seen and used. Its not a scientific conclusion (...), and i'm sure XFS
has its drawbacks. But if anybody is thinking of going for XFS, I give my
vote for sure. I have a software RAID 0 on 2 beautiful WD raptors and XFS is
flying high :)
- I tried the latest daily-build of the installer, "netinst" CD, thought I
would help a little bit with the effort, but it was a mess. I gave up after
many attempts at the partitioning step, cause the installer did not prompt me
for filesystem types, nor mount points. I reverted to the Etch beta 2
netinst, had some problems with the mirrors but at some point I found a
mirror in Austria that had the Etch files and it worked. Suppose it has
something to do with the AMD64 port being moved to the main archive (saw the
announcement after I had made the installation...)
- Speaking of moving the port to the main archive, I'm missing a lot of
packages. APT knows about them because of dependencies, but there is no
candidate. I'll just name "mysql" and "nvidia" drivers, but i think the list
is quite long, I'm just setting up my PC and discovering them one after the
other. Is this because of moving the archive? my sources.list is simply:
deb http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free
- I'm experiencing often segfaults. I've seen the AMD64 FAQ but I don't know
if 5-10 random segfaults per day is normal... "Random" means, that its not
the same application always (ranges from apt to KDE apps), and it usualy
works if I try again (example click Konqueror -> crash -> try again-> works).
I did my memtest, nothing there... Maybe you can help me pinpoint the trouble
and then I can file a bug report. I'm willing to provide as much info as
possible about this, but I don't know where to start, so just ask :)
Anyway, thanx again for the most wonderful distribution, it just made the
money I've spent on my PC worthwhile
Dimitris
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