Installing Debian on an Athlon64 System

[halfpower]

I might install Debian on my Athlon64 3500+ system, so that I will have a dual boot with Windows. Should I get the images for an i386 machine or an IA64?

 

[drag]

Either or.

Going with i386 will probably make it easier to get compatability with various 3rd party binary-only 32bit apps. You can still run them, but you'll have to install other various 32bit dependancies to get them to work correctly.

Going with 64bit will allow a slight increase in performance and will allow you to address over 4gigs of RAM to any 64bit application.

Some closed source games, like Ut2004, have had Linux 64bit versions for a long time now, but most will not have 64bit versions until after 64bit windows gets popular (probably another year or two for that)

It's up to you, i386 may be easier for a while now, but 64bit will get some other benifits.

 

[bersl2]

ERROR

IA64 != x86-64

 

[Brazen]

Unless you want to use more than 4GB of RAM, go with i386. The slight, if any, performance increase in everyday apps does not make up for the headaches with the lack of 64 bit support.

64-bit is still in a transitional period. I would guess it will be another year or so before it becomes as supported and standard as i386.

 

[drag]

All 32bit apps run just fine in 64bit Linux OS.

The problem is that you have to have 32bit libraries installed to support 32bit applications. So if you have a lot of 32bit applications it's like you have 2 operating systems installed, one for 32bit compatability and a second for native 64bit applications.

If your just using open source softare it should work fine, the vast majority of that has been ported to 64bit platforms years ago, the sucky part is when supports for closed source software or for software you can't get from Debian's normal sources and you don't want to compile it for yourself.

And yes IA64 is not 64bit for x86. IA64 is for Intel's Itanium line of proccessors, which is something else entirely.

For 64bit using stuff like the opteron you have stuff like: x86-64 AMD64 and such.

 

[OffTopic1]

The Debian GNU/Linux AMD64 HOW-TO

Native execution of legacy 32bit binaries is supported by the kernel, and core libraries are provided by the ia32-libs package.

IMHO, it would make more sense running AMD64, because it would give you a chance to play with 64bit kernel since your box is not a critical mission production computer. And, WinXP will be a good backup environment for apps compatibility.

 

[Nothinman]

Personally, I would run i386. Running 32-bit binaries in the AMD64 port is still a PITA.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Personally, I would run i386. Running 32-bit binaries in the AMD64 port is still a PITA.

Does the i386 kernel support NX?

 

[Nothinman]

I honestly don't know, but I wouldn't consider that a showstopper either.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
I honestly don't know, but I wouldn't consider that a showstopper either.

I would. I'm wierd like that.

 

[Nothinman]

For a desktop system I couldn't care less, I'm not running untrusted binaries or have any Internet exposed services anyway.