I'm currently running Gentoo for AMD64 on a dual Opteron system. Everything works fine, and I'm really happy with it. I have been able to run binaries compiled on 32-bit x86 systems without any problems so far. It sounds like you need to do some cross-compiling for 32-bit x86. I've never done that, so I can't say how well that would work, but if you have the "cross" and "multilib" USE flags, you should have all of the components you need to do that. I have also run 32-bit Slackware on the Opteron box, and that worked fine. So if you don't want to deal with the AMD64 and cross-compiling issues, you could just install a 32-bit Linux distro on it with no performance hit. Keep in mind that there aren't anywhere near as many Gentoo packages in Portage that are marked stable for AMD64 as there are for x86, so that may be a problem for you if you can't live without some specific package. There are other possible issues if you intend to use your AMD64 box as a desktop system. For example, Flash doesn't seem to work on AMD64 yet, and I don't think you can play WMV files, even with the 32-bit libraries. If you want to know more about my specific experiences with AMD64 on Linux, feel free to contact me or drop by the Sin Lab. -James
Recently I've begun considering migrating over to the amd64 platform (my motherboard just died on my athlon xp system, much to my chagrin) and figure this is a good place to ask for users experiences. I'm not worried about my video card drivers, since NVIDIA has great amd64 support, at least, so I'm told. My main concern is that I need to install some 32-bit emulation libraries and kernel modules, so I've read, to compile 32-bit apps, and that some compiled 32-bit apps will only work under a 32-bit environment, requiring me to setup a seperate environment to chroot into. I'm running gentoo and I'm up to the task, just wondering if anyone has any experience in this specifically and anything I should be concerned about or not to worry too much about. Thanks.
-- Carlton C. Stedman II, sageman@wpi.edu "To iterate is human, to recurse, divine." -- L. Peter Deutch _______________________________________________ Wlug mailing list Wlug@mail.wlug.org http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug