[SLUG] Re:Ubuntu 64 bit install

[Paul Teasdale]

On Wednesday 28 Dec 2005 02:23, Michael John Drawneek wrote:
> On Tuesday 27 December 2005 21:14, Bob Garrood wrote:
> >
> > By coincidence, I looked in on my niece over christmas, and her husband
> > has the latest ubuntu on a 64 machine.  At least I reckon it has to be
> > the latest as the gnome logo was in really tasteless new colours.  It
> > works fine, though apparently some 32-bit applications don't run, and at
> > one point the clock started moving at 4x the usual rate.  I will forward
> > the details and see if he can help.
> >
>
> 64-bit suse 9.3 been working fine on two machines for 2/3 months now, so
> whats the problem and it was a straight forward install??
>
Hi Mike,

Not trying to upset you or anything but I think SUSE 9.3 will only partially 
and/or not work (using a default installation that is) on Mr Baldwins "all 
singing all dancing" PC and I say this from experience. I too am lucky enough 
to own an AMD64 3500 with a PCI Express SLI motherboard and using Debian 
Sarge AMD64 (I know it's not SUSE but read on) I could not get certain 
critical bits of hardware working (SATA controller and sound for example) 
until I compiled and installed kernel 2.6.12. Even using 2.6.12 some bits of 
the hardware still do not work without additional kernel patches (Marvell 
1000Mb NIC for example).

However, where I will back you up is with suggesting SUSE but would recommend 
trying SUSE 10 OSS. I *have* tried SUSE 10 OSS on my AMD64 PC and it works 
perfectly with all my hardware without any additional intervention. SUSE 10 
has kernel 2.6.13 by default which appears to help. I'm no SUSE expert but 
they seem to spend a lot of time getting more exotic bits of hardware to work 
with their Linux distro which also helps.

Also, in my opinion, the install is far easier than Windows XP. Mr Baldwin is 
correct in saying that with Windows XP, during the install, you need to 
insert an SATA driver disk (at least for my mobo and apparently his) before 
the SATA controller is recognised. I also suspect that this is the same issue 
with older Linux kernels (i.e. they don't recognise the SATA controller and 
therefore the SATA disk(s)) possibly including SUSE 9.3.

Just to finish, Bob, I am not saying that the latest Ubuntu will not work for 
Mr Baldwin but I can't comment as I have never tried Ubuntu. I may give it a 
try sometime as people appear to be raving about it as the moment. If I do 
I'll post my comments back to the list. Finally I also have had problems 
running 32-bit apps and have fixed this with installing a 32-bit chroot 
environment. After a little bit of faffing around it is now transparent to 
users.

Regards,

Paul.

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