64bit Windows XP pro

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I may try Linux one day as I have never used it

as far as OSs go I have always prefered Unix, but it seems it isn't used much these days.

 

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<Cough> Linux *is* Unix effectively - it just doesn't have the old AT&T branding!

If you know Unix (BSD or SysV?) then you will have very little problem with a modern Linux system. On the surface there has been a lot of change, but the fundamentals are the same.

Harry.

 

BSD sounds farmiliar can't remember what it was though only that it was running on Sun Solaris systems.

I used it at Uni and for 4 years at work then the Gui we used was developed for win2k3 platform although the main servers for it still use the Unix commands.

Which I am the only one in my dept to have access to the server room because I don't need mountains of books if I have to fail over when the IT guys are not here.

 

Regarding the 64 bit XP, I've known people to run it well on their systems, however like many said that reason people switch back to the 32 bit is because of the drivers. What I would do is just check online to see if all my hardware is supported. Even then it is still questionable because aside from the drivers there could be other incompatibilities.

 

I received that card yesterday but havent had the OS yet, hopefully they are going to give me the 32bit instead

 

I hope so, good luck with that

 

After reading this thread yesterday I decided I'd go back and retry Debian's amd64 release on my laptop again. It has a 2.0 ghz Turion with a gig of ram in it.

Installation was smooth. The only thing that didn't work out of the box was wireless, and I have a Broadcom 4318 chipset that is just a piece of junk in my laptop. It is one of the worst wireless chipsets to get running under Linux. All that took to get running though is to install a piece of software that cuts the firmware out of the Windows drivers and installs it automatically. Then I installed something called ndiswrapper. Again a simple install. Finally I pointed ndiswrapper at the correct .inf file from the Windows drivers, and my wireless was working. It probably took me all of 5 minutes to do.

Sound, video, wired NIC, power managment, ACPI, everything but that crazy Broadcom chip worked out of the box.

To use my network printer I had to edit one file. I had to add the url for my CUPS server to /etc/cups/client.conf. After that everything was automatic. There were no drivers to install, no settings to make/change, nothing. It just worked. The client found the printer and set it up on my system. Just like magic.

Then I added one line to my /etc/apt/sources.list file, and installed flash player and mplayer. (There is no 64 bit flash player from Adobe so apt installed the 32 bit player, the needed 32 bit libraries, and configured it to work with my 64 bit Firefox/Iceweasel with no input from me) At that point I had a working system that covers all my needs for surfing, doing remote management work for my job, etc.... All my "needs" were taken care of. However, I wanted to use vlc which is a pretty cool program for playing, streaming, on-the-fly decoding, of DVDs and a large number of file formats, does video on demand, etc.... That isn't available in Etch so I upgraded to Lenny, and then to Sid.

If I had wanted to I could have also used the Linux raid on my laptop. It has dual 80 gig hard drives so I could have mirrored or striped them. What I've found though is that it really hurts battery life when needing to have both hard drives running all the time.

The last thing I did was install the ATI drivers for the integrated Radeon XPress 200M video card. They also installed without a hitch.

Then I watched a movie on it. No jumps, jerks, stutters, dropped frames, stuttering audio, etc... as I had when I first got this laptop and it had XP on it. Then video and audio performance both were so bad DVD's were simply unwatchable, and the sound coming out was broken up you couldn't tell what was being said in the movie. Multimedia performance, both in 32 and 64 bit mode, under Linux just blows away what this laptop did under Windows. There is no comparison between the two. Now it's very, very good. On a 17" monitor there are no squigglies, no pixelation, no lines, no jumps, no skips, nothing but great, highly detailed video.

So, I'd pretty much have to say that the 64 bit release from Debian is every bit as advanced as the 32 bit release, at least in my experience as I haven't tried using it on multiple systems. It's even the same kernel release number as the 32 bit kernel release on my other systems running Sid. It's also just slightly faster than the 32 bit install was. Another gig of ram would probably really make it come alive as this system only has 4200 rpm hard drives so it really needs to cache as much as possible so it isn't sitting and waiting on the hard drives so often.

It looks to me like, once again, open source is just leaving MS in the dust in terms of development and usability in new technologies. I literally have thousands of 64 bit software packages I can use. The vast majority of what's available in 32 bit has been ported to 64 bit, and that's a lot of software as Debian's Sid has approximately 18,000 software packages in its repositories. This has come a long ways since I used it last. It's probably a year and half since I last tried it, and the improvements are huge.

 

Freddy,

I've got be honest, all this talk about Liniux is making me want to try out it again. I guess I have you to partially thank for that