64-bit PC: Software or Hardware problems?
 

Hello,

I'm currently overwhelmed by work; however I found time this week-end to setup my new PC, bought second-hand:
AMD64 3200+, ATX tower, 512MB ram, Radeon graphics card; Fresh install of Free Mandriva 2007 DVD.
It is a dream-machine, compared to my former PC: a PII350 with a Rage128 graphics card!

Unfortunately, I'm to the point where I wonder if I should go back to my rock-stable PII350...

- With this new PC, I carelessly entered the 64-bit world. I discovered that all software is not available yet, especially the Flash plugin, which in turn requires the 32-bit version of Firefox. Hence each time I enter the software manager, it wants to automatically upgrade FFox and libFFox, and I have to "clear the selection" first; this is annoying.

- Things crash! For example, urpmi crashes often. Most of the time, I can relaunch and it is OK. I even had rpm crash, and had to quite often --initdb and --rebuilddb... Firefox crashes quite a lot also, but others do too: for example Gcompris crashed, or random games. It works, and then it stops... I relaunch the program and it works... or not... in which case I reboot and it works anew. xterm did this to me also: it wouldn't relaunch until I had rebooted.

- Some programs can't be used. I wanted to create an image of my hda1 partition with partimage. The 64-bit version says this arch is not supported (wrong version of GCC, even if I recompile from the srpm). The 32-bit version crashes halfway through the image-file creation (roughtly after a third of hda1 is copied).


I want to keep this wonderful speed! All is so fast! But it is really very unstable. WHY?

Is it because 64-bit is too new? Do you all 64-bit Mandriva users also have such issues?
Or is it a hardware problem with the motherboard? I spent 2+ hours checking RAM with Memtest86+ (10 passes): ram is reported OK. I tried checking the BIOS settings: settings are fine BUT something happened that never happened to me before: The BIOS config UI crashed! I mean: I was going to verify the boot order, and then nothing reacted anymore, I had to keep the halt button pressed during 5 seconds to power the PC off; this happened twice!
On the other hand, although I didn't use Windows for more than a few downloads (among which the first 4 GB of the mandriva DVD) with FFow win32, all seems fine in Windows. So?...

Yves.

If the BIOS crashed, you have a hardware problem of some sort.

That is not to say there isn't some problem with the linux OS as well, but if you can't get through the BIOS cleanly, something is wrong.

I would try to see if you can isolate what piece of hardware is crashing the box. Start by booting just the motherboard, power supply, keyboard, and RAM, no drives of any sort. Go into BIOS and play around. Let it sit on for a good hour or so, then return and see if you can still move with the keyboard. If that works, then turn it off, add one additional piece of hardware, and repeat. If the initial test fails, then you have something wrong with one of the core components.

Flash is the only problem with a 64 bit install. I've been using 64 bit Debian for 18 months, and it is the last remaining issue. There are attempts at 64 bit flash, but none of them have worked well for me yet. Flash is closed source code, so everyone is trying to reverse engineer the code, then migrate it to 64 bit. Since the Adobe developers who have the source haven't even released a 64 bit version, that tells you it is a reasonably tough job. The best solution at present is to install 2 firefoxes, one 64 bit version without flash, and a 32 bit version within a chroot at 32 bits so the regular flash plugin can be used.

Peace,
JimBass

Concur, if you have BIOS problems, that's not Linux. I second JimBass suggestion.

I've been using 64-bit Linux for a little over a year. Both Gentoo and CLFS. Both are very stable. I had Gentoo running for 237 days straight until a power outage shut me down. Linux has supported 64-bit longer than AMD and Intel have distributed 64-bit processors (and longer than MS).

Thanks! I'll try and find what's wrong then.

I had the same BIOS problems with a used AMD64 box.
Since I updated the BIOS and put another power supply in there things are fine.

Dunno about the apps crashing - didn't use man* for years but I didn't have any specific trouble with the distros I used.Didn't see any miraculous speed increases either.