Gentoo or Slackware for Athlon64 ?

K@rl` · 10-17-2004, 12:24 PM

Hi Guys,

I will be getting my 64bit setup in the not too distant future.

My favourite distro is Slackware, but I've heard the fastest 64bit system to use would be Gentoo ?

Is this the best one to use or are there better ?

Cheers.

Karl.

m00t00 · 10-17-2004, 12:50 PM

well yes. Gentoo would. If you compiled everything in slack from source, they would roughly equal. Its just because gentoo compiles all from source.

spurious · 10-17-2004, 12:54 PM

Given that Slackware is compiled to target i486, and not to AMD64, you should go with either Gentoo or Debian (which has an AMD64 port).

K@rl` · 10-23-2004, 01:53 PM

Cheers Guys.

I'd like to try Gentoo, I assume it's basically the same as all distors, in terms of installing nVidia graphics and nforce drivers ?

Hopefully should be getting the Hardware tomorrow...

vrln · 10-23-2004, 02:59 PM

No idea about the nforce drivers, but you can't use the official nvidia driver package from nvidia.com in Gentoo. It might break things. Instead, you can get the driver with portage. Emerge nvidia-glx nvidia-kernel nvidia-settings and your all set

K@rl` · 10-24-2004, 03:50 AM

Cheers, I was just reading something about that on the Gentoo forums.

I'm willing to give it a go, I can't see why not. How long does it take to install ?

vrln · 10-24-2004, 05:22 AM

Depends what stage you use. A stage3 base system (no x, no window manager etc) takes about ~2-3 hours.

K@rl` · 10-24-2004, 01:28 PM

Christ, that's some serious install time.

How much faster than Slack will it run ? Noticably ?

Crashed_Again · 10-25-2004, 05:00 PM

If you mean nforce drivers in terms of the onboard nic and sound nforce stuff then thats all done within the kernel. gentoo-dev-sources has had forcedeth(the reverse engineered nforce nic driver) for a while now. The sound stuff is done through alsa.

Portage also has all the nvidia video drivers as well. As long as /usr/src/linux points to the kernel you are using you just do:

# emerge nvidia-kernel
# modprobe nvidia

and you should be good to go.

vrln · 10-26-2004, 04:28 AM

For that hardware, Slackware isn't really an option if you want to use 64bit. Slack is a 32bit distribution.

crashmeister · 10-26-2004, 06:10 AM

How much faster it runs depends on the app.There are some apps that are slower with 64bit ;-0
There is also a lot of things that just don't work in a 64bit environment http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/amd64/technotes.xml

K@rl` · 10-30-2004, 05:57 AM

Reading through forums etc, Gentoo seems awfully complicated to install.

Are there any other 64bit distros that compare ?

mysterio · 10-30-2004, 08:47 AM

Freebsd would be a nice choice, not sure if your just looking for a linux distro, but freebsd is really nice.
http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/amd64.html