hello everyone,
this may sound excessively stupid as a question bu it appears im a bit behind with my computers knowledge...

i heard somewhere from someone who works on computers that it is possible to run a 64bit OS on any(?) processor out on the market...?
to be more specific in my situation, he claim that i can run on a core 2 duo both 32bit and 64bit OS's... is that true?
cause i thought there is a fine line in the system bus width that creates a need for dif processors in order to run 64bit OS...

the obvious advantage is that 64bits can address more that 4GB memory (and i am planning to setup up virtual machines which are memory hungry). is there another

so basically can i run 64bit OS on a core 2 duo as easily and without a performance hit as i do a 32bit OS now??? and consequently what other difficulties may i face? not widely available 64bit drivers?

programs/applications should run regardless of the OS , right?

if there is any article or guide that you can refer me too i would greatly appreciate it.
thank you in advance for your help
nass

Yes - I believe all Core2 are 64-bit (some-one will correct me if I'm wrong). Run this from a terminal "grep -o '\blm\b' /proc/cpuinfo". If you get anything back (1 line per CPU), you are 64-bit capable.
Make sure you get a multilib distro so you can mix 32-bit and 64-bit apps. There can apparently be problems with (browser) plugins like flash, but I've never seen any.See above.

so indeed
i got this output... i take it core 2 Duo is 64bit..

but which distros are multilib?
thank you for your help
nass

For example Debian. I run Debian lenny 64-bit on a 2 Duo Core Intel. I have installed the 32-bits libs and can run most 32-bits application which do not come in 64-bits. Everything in Debian is 64-bits though.

jlinkels

As I see you are using Slackware, you can try slamd64 (unofficial 64-bit slackware version), it is multilib, I'm using it now. It's quite nice.