Etch AMD64 fun and excitement
Hi. I have a new machine that I'm setting for my mother, a HP Pavilion
6305. AMD Turion-64x2, which seems to be very nice.
I only ran Vista long enough to make a restore DVD, and even that one
exercise ran smack-dab into Vista's "Deny, Permit?" insanity. Just one
command, and already I loath Vista.
So first I installed Etch i386 because I didn't have an AMD64 install
disk, and things worked acceptably well. The broadcom wireless card
wouldn't work, nor the Nvidia kernel module. But "nv" driver works, so
I'm ok with that.
I pulled down the AMD64 DVD#1, and installed from that. As before, the
install went without surprises, except that the Nvidia card and
display were _not_ detected by name and type as they were in the i386
install. I had to set the "nv" driver by hand.
The Broadcom wireless card again does not work, and neither does the
Nvidia kernel driver, even though it specifically lists the GeForce Go
6150 as supported hardware. Oh well.
I've ordered an Intel replacement for the Broadcom card, I'll know in
3 days or so if that makes any difference. Wireless is, sad to say,
_important_. If the Intel card fails also, I saw an Atheros based mini
PCI-E card for sale, and my present machine uses an Atheros based
mini-PCI card.
What finally inspired me to write this note was that Google Earth
failed to install.
---------------
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing Google Earth for GNU/Linux
4.1.7076.4458..........................................................................
setup.data/bin/Linux/amd64/setup.gtk2: error while loading shared
libraries: libxml2.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file
or directory
setup.data/bin/Linux/amd64/setup.gtk: error while loading shared
libraries: libSM.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or
directory
The setup program seems to have failed on amd64
---------------
The system is fast enough with the i386 binaries that I don't mind
going back to that if Google Earth won't work under AMD64. Because
this machine is not going to be used for compiling, or anything else
really intensive, I don't think there is going to be any perceptable
performance hit from doing so.
I would appreciate a discussion with someone who has used the AMD64
install, to see if there are things that I should know that I don't.
A big hats-off to the AMD64 team. I'm pleased that my expectations of
seamlessness, after trying both i386 and SPARC Debian, have been more
than met.
Curt-
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