As topic, are there any available?

the only non-beta I can find is SUSE, and they want me to pay or use the crappy "download by ftp" thing

some experts you are!!!

insults will get you nowhere...

anyway first off any linux distro should work on amd64, just nto optimised for 64-bit, just recompiel the kernel w/ 64 bit and you are set there, or if you want the entire system to be 64 bit you might try gentoo.

But it worked!!


I realise most distro's will work happily on 64bit, but will they install on a SATA drive?

thanks for the reply btw!

out of the box, hmm not sure, you probably need to use a custom kernel for install, not sure how to do that on any distro

hey, i don't think anyone claimed to be an expert here!

mandrake has a AMD64 specific version of mandrake 9.2 that it recently released:
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/92/amd64 -- PDF on this page sez its SATA friendly, too!!!

good luck!

I'm in the process of installing gentoo!

Over the past weekend I've installed Gentoo on and AMD64 2400 w/SATA Drives. I installed from Stage1. The 2.4 kernel did not see my SATA drives but if you boot and install with the 2.6 livecd then it should work. I am sure you realize that AMD64 support is changing daily. Its pretty exciting being on the cutting edge like this although it can be frustrating. I've been back and forth between these forums as well as the gentoo AMD64 forum. Both are excellent resources. I also found some good stuff on the NVIDIA forums. I wish there was a way to get all of this in one place.

How is your 64-bit OS going? Is it giving you any more trouble than a stage 1 install would normally? Im looking into gettin an amd64 soon, but id rather wait for it to be a little more supported.

You might want to wait for some more support from hardware vendors. I work for a large multinational company and we are evaluating several Opteron boxes. I am having trouble with both SATA and AGP. Currently we have both the hardware vendor and RedHat on the line trying to fix the problem. I installed Gentoo on it from Stage1 AMD64 sources (2.6 kernel) with very little trouble. I was able to get further with Gentoo than RedHat but still had problems with booting of SATA and AGP support. Everything I see points to bios problems and this is mainly due to the product not having mature hardware vendor support. I think in 6 months or more things should be stable but right now its really hit or miss. With that said the box that shows the most promise is the Sun Micro Opteron box. They know how to build machines and just because its a PC does not mean they use cheezy components like ..ahem.. Dell. On the bright side it is exciting to be on the cutting edge if you don't mind running into walls. :-)

hmm, so would it be a bit premature to hope for a quad-64 lin box, waiting on my desk tomorrow morning? --- just think, i could be a 1-man(box) FAH team!

Yesterday we received an updated bios for our opteron box. The bios is still in beta and has the nasty problem of not seeing any devices (hd,cdrom,floppy,etc) after the first boot. After resetting the bios defaults rebooting several times the devices came back. Once we got through all of that the kernel was able to see the AGP bus and we were able to load the Nvidia driver with no problems. Redhat is telling us now that there is an update to the kernel that will allow the AGP bus to work at full 8x speed instead of the 1x we are seeing now. Either way it works and its a start. This is what I mean when I say this is cutting edge. We are literally at hardware and software vendors mercy with these things. I know I could fix the kernel by myself but in order to stay under support with RedHat we can't. That does not mean I won't compile my own kernel anyway though

I have an AMD64 3200+ with ASUS K8v Deluxe motherboard, with a gig of ram, and ATI Raedon 9800 pro.., and I am running Serial ATA in RAID0 stiping array with 2 SATA drives.

And my experience with Linux on this rig has been......

.......

I admit I have only dabbled with Knoppix 3.3 & Knoppix STD .1 (which is 3.2 with security tools) on this system so far.. And they both just hang during boot...

It gets to APM section, and passes, and then just sits there with nothing going on.. it says "intializing........." I've left it going for 15 minutes with no changes.

I've even done a "knoppix failsafe" and it does the same thing.

So.. I guess Knoppix's not the way to go. Too bad, cause I thought it was really sweet. Especially the debian system you get after a hdinstall.

I downloaded SUSE 9.0 Evalu live cd last night, and I'm gonna give that a spin.

If that fails, too.. I'll try some actual install disks... I was wanting to avoid an full install only to find out it will not play well with my bleeding edge hardware.

Mandrake 9.2 AMD64 is definately an option for me... Can anyone confirm that this plays well with a SATA in a RAID0 Array?

Another choice is FreeBSD 5.2.1, which supports AMD64 & Serial ATA.

I'll throw Gentoo into the fray and see how it comes out.. I like there's a live cd of Gentoo to try, too. I haven't had the opportunity to look into gentoo at all yet. I have experience with the other OS/Distro's I listed, tho.. so it should help out.

Not on this hardware, though..

Meanwhile I'm using Windows XP Pro on this hardware... playing games, and kicking myself for not being more productive, other than helping out with the Jedi Academy, and helping Luke Skywalker save the Galaxy.

When I should really be helping out with LinuxQuestions.org and helping Linus Torvalds (Or Chuck the daemon) save the kernel from Bill Gatus of the Borg.

And it's schweeeet on this hardware. (the games, that is hehe)

(edit... must....learn....to....spell....)

So far I've not been able to get SATA working with this Silcon Image 3114 chipset. I can boot a Gentoo Live CD and access the drives no problem. I even installed Gentoo on this drive with 2.6 kernel and was able to write the boot sector with Grub but the boot never completes. I does a kernel panic when trying to switch to the root device. Its been very frustrating so far. We have an identical machine with SCSI and have had much better luck with that. We're waiting on a kernel patch from RedHat to fix the AGP bus but even without the patch 3-D looks really good on this box.

Just following up that I flashed my ASUS K8V BIOS to the current 1005 release.. now I can use Knoppix.

Problem was the USB device scan was crashing.. I never got that far before I upgraded the BIOS, it just hung. But after the patch, the USB scan was the very next step from where I hung... So it's that.

Coool.... I'm happynow

Patch those Bios, folks...