I have an AMD64 at work and since I don't have to use windows, I've been using Gentoo up to now. I love Gentoo, it's great on my servers, easy to manage, very configurable, etc. It was a natural switch for me from years of Slackware.
I've been having problems recently though with running Linux on my AMD64. For example, I went out and purchased Data Architect from The Kompany to do some database design type stuff. It's a binary only product that won't run against libraries linked against a 64 bit glibc. That's understandable for a closed source appliction. I started to setup a env to chroot into for 32bit applications. I couldn't get glibc to actually compile. I eventually resigned to not being able to use it. The X server (x.org) would randomly lock up, eat cpu, and become unresponsive. I would have to ssh in and restart xdm to get it going again. And openoffice *sigh*. I really like the OOo Ximian hacks, I find the UI for 1.1.x ugly. But alas portage only has OOo 32bit binary's that work on amd64. It won't compile cleanly natively. OOo 2.0 beta has potential. I used it for a bit. But I couldnt justify the 30 second startup times, nor the crashing when trying to export a file. So I switched.
I'm running Ubuntu now. I've had it for a day. It took about 15 minutes to install, it found all my hardware, I didn't have any configuration to do outside of a few choices to be made in a ui installer. Apt is pretty slick, and the debian base has come a far way since I originally wrote it off in 1995 ;-). We'll see how the experiments go, but so far I'm pretty happy with Ubuntu, gnome, gdesklets, and the sort. I'm not happy about not having access to mp3encode in the universe repository, but hey, I guess I can live with ogg here at work.
Ubuntu
Posted on March 31, 2005
