Hey,

I was wondering about some things with 64 bit..

I have an AMD 64 3200+ on the way, and will be getting an nForce 4 mobo soon, so my question is: What IS the best 64 bit distro?

SuSE 9.1 Pro (I have it sitting beside my comp), has 64 bit support - and have been told its better in 9.2. But I see issues concerning the browsers and such things as Flash and Java plugins, as well as multimedia (Cant play DVDs?)

Another alternative is Gentoo 2004.3..but so far I haven't gotten any answers on just *how* good AMD64 support is. I know in 2004.2, it was extremely buggy (Or so I was told.)

I know Mandrake has AMD64 - insight on that would be nice (Never used Mandrake before..)

And also, Fedora Core 3 - I know it supports AMD64 as well, but I've also seen general problems (Like with SuSE).

Is there any alternate to these distros? Or within these distros are there fixes / patches / workarounds so it acts just like a "normal" (Think 32 bit) dsitro?

Any input would be appreciated.

Thanks!

I've been using gentoo AMD64 since 2004.1 and I haven't found it buggy at all. It doesn't have as many packages as the x86 version, but it has all the main ones. I've found the x86 emulation in gentoo to be pretty good - you can install the common 32-bit libraries through portage.

No matter which distro you choose, you will not be able to use the flash plugin if your browser is compiled in 64-bit. The plugin is closed-source and there is only a 32-bit version available. You can always use a 32-bit browser instead. Java works in 64-bit without problems. I haven't had any problems with DVDs either.

Most 64-bit distros will have 32-bit emulation libraries that will let you run programs compiled for 32-bit machines. If you want it to act like a 32-bit distro, though, your best bet is to install a 32-bit distro. amd64 processors will run 32-bit code natively.

another vote for gentoo

and btw, here is a link in the gentoo forum for flash plugin working under 64bit konqueror

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=216959&start=0