i586/i686 on an AMD64 System

bdprem · 01-31-2005, 12:42 PM

I plan on buying a laptop soon and am looking at the AMD64 units. I like to run multiple distro's on my machines and I am wondering if I may run into a problem. How well do the 32 bit distro's run on a 64 bit system? Am I asking for a lot of headaches?

teval · 01-31-2005, 02:42 PM

Perfectly.
32 bit binaries will be fine, though if the distro doesn't have a kernel for your CPU it won't work.

What do you mean by 32 bit distro?

Binaries that are compiled for 32 bit PCs will be fine.

bdprem · 01-31-2005, 03:04 PM

Sorry about not being very clear. By 32 bit distro's, I'm refering to those that only have kernel builds for Pentiums/Athlons.

Suse and Fedora offer builds for AMD64's. But Knoppix, Mepis, Xandros don't (at least not that I'm currently aware of). Would I have problems putting Knoppix on it? Or would I need to rebuild the kernel?

x86havoc · 01-31-2005, 05:57 PM

Hi.
I have a AMD64 3200 Newcastle box, and have no problem at all to work with Mandrake 10.1 (i586). Before, I ran MDK 10.0 (i586) and that was 'sometimes' pretty unstable... so... it probably depends on the distro. So far I did NOT use any 64-bit distro.
Good luck! x86h ;)

bdprem · 02-01-2005, 08:30 AM

Thank you for the feedback. I was eyeing the Acer AMD64 laptop. I can bump it up to 1 GB or RAM and still keep it within my price range. But, I started wondering if I was going to be limiting myself to distro's with an AMD64 build.