[Gllug] Decent 64-bit linux distro

[M.J. Smith]

Hi everyone,

Can anyone point me to a decent 64-bit distro?  I have recently acquired a Core 2 Duo Dell (Inspiron 530) and have had a series of problems with all the 64-bit distros I have tried.  I have Fedora 10 installed at the moment, which holds for ages when booting trying to start eth0 and usually fails, and I have sometimes been able to get it to start using the command line and sometimes not.  Ubuntu Intrepid, when I loaded up the desktop disc, would load the network when I requested it, but its installer would not handle the LVM filesystems that Fedora 10 had set up by default, and the alternate installer-only disc would not even boot, putting up a series of error messages relating to USB and the disc controller.  OpenSUSE 11.1 would not bring up the network either during installation, and when I'd finished the configuration, it baled out with an error saying it couldn't create a LVM filesystem.

Can anyone tell me how to fix my network problem?  It's not my wires or my router, because Windows Vista handles it fine.  My network interface is an onboard 10/100 affair, which I presume is Intel.  I have done some searching and found that people were having problems with Ubuntu Feisty with Dell network interfaces in 2007, but surely the same problem should not be reoccurring nearly two years later, on what is standard hardware in the UK on the lowest-priced PC kit?

Does anyone else get my impression that the 64-bit versions of the popular distros are afterthoughts which aren't tested properly?  I can't believe the installer for a major distro simply could not handle LVM filesystems.  Does anyone have a fix for these issues or should I just install the 32-bit version?

Regards,

Matt Smith

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