Good 64-bit Distros?

[DarkDexter]

Sorry that I have been off the fourms so much recently... been busy with work and school and other stuff. Anyway, I am gonna be installing Linux on my gaming rig (I have done this before under RAID 0, however it was a pain in the butt and only Fedore Core 5 worked... and I didnt like fedora)

The system uses NvRAID which seems to be very AntiLinux. If that has changed, please mention it! Speed Benefits are fun!

Anyway, I was thinking of unRAIDing everything and dual booting Windows x64 (for gaming) and using Debian on it. However, I have never used Debian 64, is it good? Is there another 64 bit distro that better. I have been looking at SUSE cause i heard it is good, but now the hot thread is that it sux... lol

Ideas? Opinions? Thanks in advance for responces!

[dkeav]

any distro will work, but you will probably need a 2.6.15 kernel and custom initrd

[DarkDexter]

Custom initrd's make me cry :(

Is Debian's 64-bit branch stable? Or should I go for ubuntu to get a debian-like system? I love Mepis but its not 64-bit... *aggro*... maybe it will be oneday, I have 180gb raptor i am gonna put it on so ubuntu should work. I bought a 300gb usb harddrive to backup my filez before I start messing around, it should be here in a few days.

Any ideas/comments till then are greatly appreciated!

[je_fro]

I always recommend gentoo for odball arches like amd64, sparc and alpha. Even though amd64 is becoming less oddball, I still stand by my recommendation.

[dkeav]

granted, and gentoo livecd's already have dmraid support, just boot with gentoo dodmraid

[mrBen]

Ubuntu and (I believe) SuSE both come in AMD64 flavours. I would be surprised if Fedora didn't too.

[DarkDexter]

Yeah, Fedora does, I'll try Ubuntu (cause I'm lazy) and if that fails... I'll take a few days off work and try gentoo for the first time... *excited!*

[dkeav]

the big issue is going to be your dmraid, you have to have a custom initrd that has dmraid support in it, which is not for the faint of heart to create, but there are plenty of howto's

second the newer kernel versions break dmraid, and only some beta versions that are hard to get and usually wont compile work with them, so basically you are stuck with a 2.6.15 kernel for now, till things are updated

[hotcold]

Hi, DarkDexter.

I think most vanilla users consider 64-bit stuff not quite ready.

I am a vanilla user, and have used it on an AMD64 box I have:

SuSE Linux 9.1 (x86-64)
VERSION = 9
without any significant trouble.

I have also used Ubuntu-64, but that had some serious problems with video.

The best overall box I have used was a DEC Alpha workstation, first with RedHat 4 (~; early at any rate; even with Windows NT Alpha!), and more recently with SuSE 8 Alpha. Unbelievably fast -- not just at the time, but even in the more recent past.

I have not tried any software RAID on 64-bit, so I cannot speak to that, other than software RAID (and striping) seems to be preferable to hardware RAID (except for really demanding RAID-5, etc -- I once used a big SIMD box that had a very wide RAID, perhaps 30-40x , very early in the game, and it was useful, even inventive, considering the technology at the time -- but I digress).

As a gamer, you're on the leading edge. In the chicken-and-egg world, if 64-bit stuff doesn't get used, then the vendors won't put any additional effort into development and maintenance. So I encourage you to join the vocal segment that uses 64-bit and let the vendors know when something is wrong. You want speed, so to get it you're going to need to live with some inconvenience ... cheers, hotcold

[DarkDexter]

Thanks for the indepth reply HotCold. It seems like I am stuck with broken dmraid. I've gotten this system running by just unraiding everything.. might be a ok solution, esp for dual booting. RAID 0 with two Raptors is neat but I guess pretty unecessary. When I get some time off work and school I'll back up my data to my external HDD and take a shot at it. Unfortunatly Winblows cant format the thing to be FAT32 (i want it like that so all my iBook, Windows XP, and other computers can use the same HDD to backup). I'll use disk utiliity on Mac to format it.

Thank you also Dkeav, didn't know about dmraid being broken in the more recent kernels. I'll be posting my progress on this in the mean time, I'll probably write a letter to asus or nvidia about their broken support!

[dkeav]

there are some guys that are getting some pre_release versions of dmraid to build and work with 2.6.17, but its very hit and miss and hard to reproduce the results for other users

so until dmraid is fully updated, you are stuck with the older kernel

[michux]

I would suggest Kubuntu for 64-bits. It's not perfect but it seems to provide one of the best 64-bit supports - lots of software, quite easy way to get the proprietary stuff.

Take a look at the Kubuntu 6.06 on Athlon 64 (http://polishlinux.org/linux/ubuntu/kubuntu-606-on-athlon-64/) review - it may be helpful for the first steps.

I'm using Kubuntu on amd64 myself and it is working pretty fine.

[Apostata]

If I may offer my 2 cents - I'm not a power-user, but I know my way around a Linux system.

I've been running Kubuntu 64-bit Dapper for over a month now, and I'm less than crazy about it. I don't know what my expectations should be (for 64-bit support), but here are some issues I've had:

- cannot write to USB flash drive (see here (https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.15/+bug/56769) )

- cannot get Flash to work unless loading 32-bit Firefox...which hasn't solved the fact that, because I prefer using Konqueror, I still can't get it to work in this browser. There is apparently a fix here (http://www.linuxfordummies.org/index.php?topic=625.0), but again, it's yet another layer of workarounds.

I just don't think 64-bit Linux is "there yet".

[Omnscnt(Sortof)]

I'm no expert, but if your lazy and want a good distro, Slam64 seems to be pretty good. It worked for me [for most things].

I wouldn't recommend ubuntu or any of it's variants for anyone. It just doesn't seem to work with anything I ever tried installing on it. :mad: