While a long time RedHat and Fedora user, I'm now a little confused about which Fedora distribution to install on a new Dell laptop that should be arriving any day now. My existing Dell D810 is running x86 32-bit Fedora Core 6 just fine on its single core CPU at the moment. BTW, I'm just fine with sticking with FC6 for the time being since FC7 is still pretty new.

Here's the relevant info on the new system:

- Dell Latitude D830, Intel Core 2 Duo T7700, 2.40GHz, 800Mhz 4M L2 Cache, Dual Core with 2Gb of RAM, 256MB NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M & 120GB Hard Drive @ 7200RPM.

I've seen differing opinions as to which distro to install on this beast. Of course, I could just stick with a vanilla 32-bit FC6 and I assume that'll work OK, but I want to squeeze as much juice as possible out the 2 CPU's and 64-bit addressing as well if that'll not complicate matters. So here are my questions:

1) Should I install a 32 or 64-bit Fedora distro?

2) Assuming this system can really use 64-bit addressing, is it really worth it to install the 64-bit distro? When last I looked at this, folks were constantly complaining about the lack of 64-bit libs. I don't really need the address space and all my apps are currently 32-bit, but I don't want to unnecessarily throttle the machine back if that's what can happen when you run in 32-bit mode on 64-bit CPUs.

3) There used to be a separate FC SMP version, which I currently have running on another of my older servers that really has two separate Pentiums II's. Is that still required for this Core 2 Duo system or will a standard FC6 distro recognize the dual-core architecture automatically?

4) Do I have to do anything special to make sure that both CPU's are being used to their max extent?

TIA muchly for any help or pointers to the answers.

--Ted

Installing a 64 bit version may give you a slight performance increase when using certain applications. However, Many users report problems with 64 bit versions, such as the ability to install flash.

Installing a 32 bit version cannot do any harm, and i doubt you will feel any general speed increase

The noticeable speed increase will come from the smp processor. And support for smp is supported out of the box by almost all modern distros, including Fedora Core.

1) Doesn't matter. If you need flash player (although nspluginwrapper can handle that for 64-bit), java (in browser), or wine, then get the 32-bit version. The kernel supports Core 2 Duo with SMP support.
2) You won't encounter any issues. In fact, you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between 32 and 64 bit.
3) See #1 last sentence.
4) See #1 last sentence.

Thanks for the input. I've downloaded and installed the FC7 x86_64 version, but after getting most of it functioning OK (the Intel sound card still isn't working), I'm starting to have some misgivings and may in fact go back to the 32-bit version. Those browser and wine issues (some of which I already knew) may turn out to be more of a pain than I expected, even using the nsapiwrapper. I'm afraid I may uncover more such idiosyncracies over time and don't have the patience right now to fight them without a big gain in performance. One such issue I just came across is VMware 6.0 which is complaining about not being able to install on this x86_64 distro.

Cheers,

--ted