I am currently running 2.6.8-3-386. I have an ASUS
K8V-X SE motherboard with an amd athlon64 3300
processor. I have been trying unsuccessfully to
get an ATI9250 by Connect3D to run properly. I am giving up on that and have ordered a nvidia 6200.
I would like to ask if there is any advantage to
changing the kernel to amd64. I put it in the other
day and found it to be no help in getting the 9250
to work, but did not look at any other features or
performance. All advice appreciated.

did you check out this link? it seems many have got it to work. im sure the 6200 will work as well, as it seems nvidia is better with drivers for linux.
if your just running 32-bit software then theres no point having a 64-bit cpu. i say download a 64-bit Linux distribution and youll see an improvement. changing the kernel wont help getting the video card to work. just make sure to download the 64-bit drivers for the video card when you get it, and if your on your 64-bit os.

I run a dual boot, Debian Etch. One side is i386, the other side is AMD64. The AMD64 is definitely better at what it does than the 32-bit, but it doesn't do nearly as much. I think you have a fairly good chance of getting your ATI card working on 32-bit etch, but I haven't tried it yet. I have been running the 64-bit quite a while, but only yesterday replaced Windows with the 32-bit.

If you only have enough room for the 64-bit, you'll probably need to set up a 32-bit chroot if you want to run OpenOffice, Flash, Mozilla java plugins, etc. There a quite a few tutorials around explaining how to do that.

rickh, you can even use you 32 bit install as your chroot

To answer the posters question, I would definetly use the amd64 version.

Java is avaible in 64 bit, there is an open source flash called gnash which will run flash 7. Can't do better than that with the abobe version for linux anyways.

For Open Office you can use http://people.debian.org/~rene/openo.../experimental/

I have even got wine working in both my chroot enviroment, and alternativly by adding a few libs to the ia32lib that debian provides.

If you have a Nvidia card on the way you will have no trouble setting that up.

Ati is broken (as far as installing the offical debian way) on both the 32 bit and 64 bit version if you are looking ad SID or Etch

Have you used that Open Office, JackieBrown? Works pretty good. I've mostly used calc ... Handled importing from a delimited text file real well. Normal sorts and formatting work well. Don't try to copy a cell {Ctrl+C}, tho. Aborts the program.

I only plan on keeping the parallell 32-bit around until AMD64 catches up. As I said, ... the things it does run are a marked improvement over the 32-bit.

I pretty much use koffice for everything. If a ms doc or such refuses to open then I use OO.

I agree about the amd64. When I first got my system I installed 32 bit because I thought chroot and all that stuff would be such a hassell to remove any advantage.

I tried the amd branch on a whim and was shock at the responsivness. There are so many how-to's out there - plus debian really does make things easy.

I have learned more about packaging my own debs, managing my system, and debian in general in the past 4 months than I have in the past year. I pretty much live in linux but realized I had stop my knowledge searching when I got comfortable. Now it's back!

I don't think I could go back the 32 bit world. I have a 32-bit install on a spare partition since I do live in SID, but have not had to use it much. I chroot into it every couple days to keep it up-to-date but that is the most use I get out of it.

Don't want to totally hijack the thread, but one other problem I have with AMD64 is K3B (cdrecord). I doesn't work right. Haven't checked it again after the last few dist-upgrades, but it just doesn't make accurate copies. If I fill a cd-r with mp3s, when I play it, there are lots of extraneous beeps and things. I can't get it to make an .iso that will pass the md5checksum, and they don't work. Any cd-burning here has to be done on the 32-bit.