Hello! I recently acquired an AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 off of a freebie site for 21 referrals. What is the best 64bit linux distro for this bad boy?

LinuxFromScratch

Haha! Not quite ready for that yet.

Depends on your hardware. I have a wireless card that was difficult to get working. I tried Ubuntu, Mandriva, Gentoo, Kanotix, CentOS, FC4 and Suse - all 64 bit. The wireless card didn't work in Ubuntu, CentOS and Suse, but they seem like pretty nice distros.
If you like to use gui's for configuring your system, then all except Gentoo are pretty good. Gentoo was pretty hard to set up, but the documentation on the website made it rather easy. I just did exactly what it said and it worked. It takes a long time though. The other ones are very easy to set up. Kanotix is a live distribution and I like it a lot. I installed it to my harddrive. It is basically debian, so you might as well install that instead, but to try out a live linux in 64 bit, Kanotix 64 is the only option I believe.
Good luck with your choice!
E

I was planning on trying Kanotix 64. Thank you!

---John---

Kanotix... based on Debian.. Debian is good and stable...

You need to decide what are your primary concerns for using the machine.. and make an informed decision based upon those results... I can suggest some examples.. but also.. i suggest you try several for yourself...

If you're focussed on:
Stability: Debian or FreeBSD(not Linux)

Performance: Gentoo, Slamd64(Slackware-64), or FreeBSD

Lots of Eye Candy and Multimedia: SuSE (SuSE was alos the first Linux to support 64-bit so my guess is that they have the majority of the bugs worked out)

Good Luck...

Does any one know witch distribution is the best to install on a laptop AMD 64? (with wireless card, "US robotocs 54Mb" or the internal one "PRISM")