Please Recommend a distribution for 64-bit architecture
 

Hello All,
I would like to take some advice from you all on which distribution should I go with for my brand new 64 bit system (AMD).

From Fedora's site, I see that they have a 64 bit FC4 for download and I see the same from FreeBSD. I prefer to be running a "Linux" system as opposed to something like FreeBSD.

I am planning to run a web/email server for few domains. Security and Stability are my main concerns in an OS. I am familiar with Debian, FC3, RH9. I think Debian currently has an "unstable" release for 64bit architecture.

Does anybody have good /bad stories to share about their experience of installing/maintaining a particular distribution (64 bit)???
Please feel free to add your comments/suggestion on which distribution will be safe to go with in a 64 bit architecture computer.

Thank you.

I have a 64-bit pc with mandrake 10.2 and suse 10.0 pro
Both of them work really great! (servers, apps, configuration)
Both of them come with mail and webserver, good firewall and security-settings.
I checked knoppix as well and works fine.

Don't really know what system runs the smoothest,
I think you just first choose your linux, and then check out
reviews on the net or so, most of them have quite a stable 64-bit kernel,
and I think not all applications are 64-bit compiled, they are 32-bit and run
under 64-bit kernel

to make it short:
find out what OS and what applications you want, compare and then decide!

64 bit rocks!

Thanks for sharing your above comments. My intention of this machine is to run as a web/e-mail server. Most likely I will be using the latest "stable" release of Apache as my webserver software and "pure-ftpd" as my ftp server software, since I am already very familiar with both.
Also, other "goodies" such as MySQL, PHP are on the list of software that I will be installing.


Anyways, currently I am downloading CentOS distribution for 64-bit architecture. I read some good things about it plus I thought I might support them since their website says, "CentOS is a growing community" (well, not exactly those words but you get the idea) - www.centos.org


The other consideration for me is to download the Fedora 4 (64-bit) as well. If I have any problems installing CentOS then I have something else to fall back. Let's hope the CentOS installation goes well... I won't be doing any installation till this weekend latest:-(


Any second thoughts about CentOS 4.2?? or Fedora 4?? (64-bit) . Anybody???

I know you said you would prefer to not.. but if you want a rock solid system with excellent security for 64-bit architecture.. I would not hesitate to use FreeBSD...

But it's also my server platform of choice on x86 as well...

That aside.. It is my understanding that SUSE has excellent support for 64-but platform (since they were the first to support it as well). If this is for a company i would recommend SLES though... And I doubt you want to pay for the licensing/support costs...

From what I have heard/read...Gentoo supports x86-64 quite well.. but it's bit of a hump to get over understanding how it all works... after that though.. system maintenance is very easy in Gentoo..

I am running Debian testing 64bit version, and it is rock solid. For a server, you probably want Debian stable.

I have very good experiences with Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS and CentOS 4.x on x86_64 machines. It runs very stable, and compatibility with 32-bit applications is pretty good.