[Sderby] Hardware help.

[Harry Sheppard]

Hello,

> Would be glad to hear other people's comments on running 64bit. 
Well, I've only run Gentoo/Athlon64, however it proved to be so reliable 
during testing that I now have a small farm of five dual-processor AMD64 
boxes acting as network video servers for non-linear editing suites:  It was 
a client being pikey and not wanting to buy Avid LanShare Unity EX that 
forced me to invent this solution, but it does work extremely well. The 3ware 
RAID controllers, gigabit network cards and the OS itself all seems extremely 
stable and well behaved. Use nVidia graphics cards, though - they're by far 
and away the best supported under AMD64. ATi's support is dire...

> I've  alway's wanted to get hold of a DEC Alpha AXP or some similar box I
> could  run a non-x86 64 bit system (Linux, *BSD, even WinNT was available
> for Alpha) on.  (Just to be different really:-).  I'm fairly sure that this
> is  what you are now getting if you buy an Athlon64 or Opteron processor and
> obtain the native, rather than the x86 port of your OS.
Indeed, although it's a lot more cost effective running on x86-64 than the 
other more exotic platforms. I presently have Gentoo running successfully on 
some Sun Enterprise series servers and an ickle Ultra-10 (64-bit UltraSPARC), 
a Mac DP 2.0GHz G5 (disturbingly quick!) and a Hewlett-Packard C-series 
PA-RISC box (absolute fscker to set up, but clock-for-clock appears to outrun 
Sun hardware by a phenominal margin).

Initially you think "WOW! I'm running Linux on something other than x86!" but 
actually it's extremely boring after the initial set-up - when you're 
shelling in or developing for a web site that your non-x86 box is serving 
there's extremely little do differentiate it from the more ordinary 
platforns. Still fun though.

Incidentally, if anyone can shed any light as to why Sun call their ethernet 
controllers "HappyMeal" and "BigMac" I'd be intregued to hear it :-)


All the best,
Harry Sheppard
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