Best 64-bit OS?

[MilitaryIntelligence]

I just bit the bullet and purchased some new hardware:

AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
4GB OCZ DDR400
XFX GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB
and a few other goodies

I've heard good and bad things about the 64-bit Windows. Would a 64-bit Linux distro be better? I've looked at the 64-bit driver list from AMD and it doesn't look like I'll have any driver issues. I'll probably end up doing a dual boot setup, just looking for some good suggestions.

 

[Shenkoa]

Stay away from 64 Bit windows for a while, there is not a lot that supports it yet.

 

[Tbirdkid]

it works fine for me. i have no problems. i even play bf2, run java, my network works well etc. i would dual boot. thats what i am doing. i am dual booting ubuntu 64 and win xp 64. works great. native support for all of my stuff. although, upgrading the drivers is a good idea.

 

[timswim78]

I have a similarly equipped system, and here are my experiences:

- XP64: Won't Install on my SATA drive, and I'm not going to buy and install a floppy drive to install a trial piece of software.
- Fedora Core 4 x64: Very buggy. Many of the x64 packages crash, causing you to revert to i386 packages. Kind of feels defeating to do that.
- Suse 9.3: Very Solid. Not one problem yet.

 

[sourceninja]

XP64 is nice, but right now I dont see a point as almost everything I want to use besides antivirus and farcry (and I dont really want to use antivirus) is 32bit.

I use gentoo in 64 bit, but it is clunky and requires a chroot for 32bit apps (with an exception of a few bins). But a lot of the apps I use compile to 64 bit, or have 64bit versions and in some (ut2004) the speed increase is noticable.

SuSe looks very well polished for 64bit, they did it right with /lib32 and /lib64. Plus they have dependancy resolution setup to allow you to install both 32 and 64bit apps. But I really dont like rpm based distro's and I find yast very clunky.

 

[n0cmonkey]

OpenBSD, of course.

 

[dguy6789]

Originally posted by: sourceninja
XP64 is nice, but right now I dont see a point as almost everything I want to use besides antivirus and farcry (and I dont really want to use antivirus) is 32bit.

I use gentoo in 64 bit, but it is clunky and requires a chroot for 32bit apps (with an exception of a few bins). But a lot of the apps I use compile to 64 bit, or have 64bit versions and in some (ut2004) the speed increase is noticable.

SuSe looks very well polished for 64bit, they did it right with /lib32 and /lib64. Plus they have dependancy resolution setup to allow you to install both 32 and 64bit apps. But I really dont like rpm based distro's and I find yast very clunky.

Where can you get a 64 Bit version of UT2004?

 

[The Linuxator]

listen I have installed the download version of windows 64-bit and I didn't bother with activating it becasue it was crap, right now I have
on my raptor WinXP Pro 32-bit with the longhorn transformation kit, and I completley love it.
for 64-bit go Fedora Core 4 that's what I have and I am lovin it

 

[The Linuxator]

Ofcourse If you are wondering about the activation they do let you use winxp-64 for 14 days before activating it and I used it for three days and that was it Norton doesn't even work on it, neither trendmicro nor Mcafee so how are you going to use it safely. Non of my games worked on it too.

 

[sourceninja]

Originally posted by: dguy6789

Originally posted by: sourceninja
XP64 is nice, but right now I dont see a point as almost everything I want to use besides antivirus and farcry (and I dont really want to use antivirus) is 32bit.

I use gentoo in 64 bit, but it is clunky and requires a chroot for 32bit apps (with an exception of a few bins). But a lot of the apps I use compile to 64 bit, or have 64bit versions and in some (ut2004) the speed increase is noticable.

SuSe looks very well polished for 64bit, they did it right with /lib32 and /lib64. Plus they have dependancy resolution setup to allow you to install both 32 and 64bit apps. But I really dont like rpm based distro's and I find yast very clunky.

Where can you get a 64 Bit version of UT2004?

After patching to the latest ut2004 linux patch, you will see a 64bit bin.

here's a link for the demo client
http://www.beyondunreal.com/dl.php/offi.../ut2004/ut2004-lnx64-demo-3120.run.bz2


It works great.

 

[sourceninja]

Sorry for double post, forgot I just posted to this thread

Originally posted by: The Linuxator
Ofcourse If you are wondering about the activation they do let you use winxp-64 for 14 days before activating it and I used it for three days and that was it Norton doesn't even work on it, neither trendmicro nor Mcafee so how are you going to use it safely. Non of my games worked on it too.

you could install a 64bit antivirus like avast.

The only games that wont work on windows 64 are games that use crappy copy protection like starforce, because they require a driver to run. Starforce has a 64bit driver though, its just a matter of game companys patching their copy protection.

 

[speedstream5621]

I love x64. I don't know why you would get a 32-bit OS now, especially with that hardware. All of my programs work perfectly. The only "problem" I've had is ATI's AIW stuff not being supported yet, but that is ATI's problem.

 

[thirdlegstump]

If you wanted the best 64bit system, you should've gotten a Mac.

 

[Tbirdkid]

I wouldnt take a heapin dump on a mac. Unless of course, its a lappy. No use for it at home.

 

[groovin]

using 64 bit Gentoo. Works great so far.

 

[Nothinman]

If you wanted the best 64bit system, you should've gotten a Mac.

And then installed Debian/PPC on it.

 

[xtknight]

Relevant specs (no O/C for now):

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (Socket 939)
AMD Athlon 64 3500+@2.20GHz 512KB L2 Winchester 90nm. (cooled by Zalman 7700AlCu)
Leadtek GeForce 6800 256-bit/256MB
2GB RAM (4x512MB) (soon)
500GB SATA (250GB[Maxtor DM10 72K RPM 16MB NCQ],250GB[WD Caviar 72K RPM 16MB SATA2])

I love my boot setup. I tri-boot the following (and recommend you do the same).

[*]Windows XP 32-bit SP2 - no issues
[*]Windows XP x64 - no TV tuner driver, Battlefield 2 runs better than on 32-bit
[*]Fedora Core 4 AMD64 - no sound or TV tuner, installed accelerated NVIDIA driver

I use the Opera 8.02 browser on all 3 OSes.

Windows XP x64 Device Drivers:

[*]Audigy 2 ZS 64-bit Beta drivers
[*]NVIDIA Forceware 78.03 Beta 64
[*]Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet

My 64-bit OSes have never crashed despite beta drivers. Besides my TV tuner (ATI TV Wonder USB2), I have no reason to be on 32-bit Windows XP now. Linux still needs its kinks worked out but Windows x64 seems more stable than 32 at this point. I can even play Battlefield 2 a lot smoother on x64. Currently I have 1GB of RAM and will be getting 2GB very shortly. Maybe x64 manages memory a lot better?

I use GRUB boot loader.

BTW, since you have an A64 X2, make sure in Linux you choose the -smp kernel (the installer might do it automatically). Windows 32/64's installer should automatically choose the SMP HAL.

Installation order (this is important):
[*]1. Windows 32-bit
[*]2. Windows 64-bit
[*]3. Fedora Core 4

If you install Linux before Windows, the Windows installations will overwrite the bootloader, so you want to install Linux last unless you know how to reinstall GRUB.

Partitions (also important):
[*]Maxtor DM10 250GB
[*][1]223GB NTFS5 (XP32 and all data)
[*][2]4.88GB NTFS5 (XP64 sys, hidden under XP32)
[*][3]3.91GB ext3 (FC4 sys "/")
[*][4]1.00GB ext3 (FC4 sys "/usr/local/games" (quake2))
[*][5]635MB swap (FC4 sys swap)
[*]WD Caviar 250GB
[*][1]250GB NTFS5 32K cluster (data and XP64 "Program Files")

Crappy partitions, I know, but it's important to install all the OSes on a partition by themselves. The way I have it set up is one big XP32 partition (main OS and all data), then small partitions for the other OSs' system files. I have another miscellenaeous drive to which I dedicate to any other data and my XP64's separate Program Files (which don't all fit on the small allocated system partition). XP32 and XP64's Program Files will conflict and Linux does not work well (if at all) on a FAT32/NTFS partition, let alone with Windows on the same partition. Don't even try it...

 

[nweaver]

grub-install /dev/hda (I add the --no-floppy option to that)

of course, after doing it a bijillion times learning gentoo/linux, it's easy to remember.

 

[DidlySquat]

A few points -

1. Both Linux and Windows 64 bit versions have problems, and provide little benefit right now, so in my opinion they are not worth the hassle. For example, in windows xp-x64, HL2 and steam did not install correctly because of the path 32-bit programs are located. Also farCry (32 bit) would lock up my machine regularly. In linux, the chroot is a must for many apps, like cedega and there are many issues with lib paths etc. Also many firefox plugins are not available in 64-bit so you can't run firefox 64 bit with all the stuff you want. also many packages are missing. I did some benchmarking using UT2004 (the 64 bit executable is included in the game directory) deathmatch timedemos and could not see any speed improvement over 32-bit version.

2. To re-install grub after windows takes over the master boot record (or if it gets corrupted), you need to boot using a knoppix live CD (always have one handy), mount your linux root partition (e.g. sudo mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2) where the boot directory exists (if /boot is a separate partition you need to mount that too under the root partition), and then give this command in a terminal:

sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/hda2 /dev/hda

 

[The Linuxator]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

If you wanted the best 64bit system, you should've gotten a Mac.

And then installed Debian/PPC on it.

With Fedora Core 4 PPC on top of that :thumbsup:

 

[Nothinman]

With Fedora Core 4 PPC on top of that

Hardly, yum on any architecture is going to be slow and annoying.

 

[sourceninja]

Originally posted by: DidlySquat
A few points -

1. Both Linux and Windows 64 bit versions have problems, and provide little benefit right now, so in my opinion they are not worth the hassle. For example, in windows xp-x64, HL2 and steam did not install correctly because of the path 32-bit programs are located. Also farCry (32 bit) would lock up my machine regularly. In linux, the chroot is a must for many apps, like cedega and there are many issues with lib paths etc. Also many firefox plugins are not available in 64-bit so you can't run firefox 64 bit with all the stuff you want. also many packages are missing. I did some benchmarking using UT2004 (the 64 bit executable is included in the game directory) deathmatch timedemos and could not see any speed improvement over 32-bit version.

2. To re-install grub after windows takes over the master boot record (or if it gets corrupted), you need to boot using a knoppix live CD (always have one handy), mount your linux root partition (e.g. sudo mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/hda2) where the boot directory exists (if /boot is a separate partition you need to mount that too under the root partition), and then give this command in a terminal:

sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/hda2 /dev/hda

I didn't notice the speed improvement in ut2004 until I was on a large onslaught map with tons of people. I got less "lag" while trying to run though a full screen of players.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

With Fedora Core 4 PPC on top of that

Hardly, yum on any architecture is going to be slow and annoying.

Ok then, donate it it to OpenBSD. :evil:

 

[Nothinman]

Ok then, donate it it to OpenBSD

I don't see yum anywhere on the donation list =)

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Ok then, donate it it to OpenBSD

I don't see yum anywhere on the donation list =)

:laugh:

I'm saving up for a couple of G5s. One for me, one to donate. They don't need yum, they have a better solution: OpenBSD packages.