“For those of you expecting a rundown of all the features in Mandrake 9.2 or a large number of screenshots, this is probably not the right article for you.However, if you have an AMD64 box and are looking to install a Linux distribution on it this just might help you make a decision on what or what not to install. One of us here at the `Burn actually has a job that involves working with Mandrake boxes and tech support and would probably have a good idea of the possible pitfalls and already know how to go about avoiding them. Unfortunately, I am certainly not that person and I jumped into this install just a little too enthusiastically and with overly high expectations.”
If you’re curious about this article, click on over to the article at pcburn.
I heard the install of 9.2 was hell and that was a buggy release. ALso AMD64 is kinda new so I wouldnt expect major support for it in the 2.4 series versus the 2.6 series. Probably its best to wait till the next distro release this year before considering running linux on AMD 64.
did u check md5 checksums of the cd’s ? just a thought, it could be that the cd’s were not right downloaded. I also only found a rc of mandrake 9.2 for amd on the mirrors.
ace70330f1f93435f29b69cbc75b0d45 MandrakeLinux-9.2rc1-CD1.amd64.iso
8dcd9d8730c8aad7ae38ea120be001d1 MandrakeLinux-9.2rc1-CD2.amd64.iso
37df80b6ac849b2fa10322a7f4f995c8 MandrakeLinux-9.2rc1-CD3.amd64.iso
Aw yes, I’m sure if he’d used gentoo it would have worked :-). Honestly, I have no idea. I do however know this. 1.0 of anything never works right. That goes for hardware and software. Amd64 is new and so is Mandrake 9.2 64 bit edition. Sad but not suprising. Every wise company out there always waits until at least one service pack is released for an upgrade on Windows to make a move. One could argue that Win 2000 is just now stabilizing.
As for the article, I thought it was a bit naive that the author assumed Mandrake 9.2 for 64 bits would have updated the isos with all the updates. That would quailify as a new release like Mandrake 9.2r2 or something along those lines. Mandrake 9.2 came out months ago and I’m sure not much more was done to it other than a recompile and minimal fixes to get it to 64 bits.
My $.02.
i wonder how *BSD on AMD64 compares with linux/mandrake on AMD64?
t
Works great here! FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE didn’t recognize the new VT8237 revid.. but that was fixed in -CURRENT a day or 2 later.
CPU: Athlon64 3000+
Mobo: MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R
RAM: Crucial 1GB PC3200
Sound: Audigy2 works out of the box.
Video: 9800Pro works with XFree86 4.3.0’s VESA driver.
I enjoyed the article in a ‘bitter sweet’ way, since I spent the better part of yesterday and today banging my head against the wall while Mandrake 10 beta 1 was tearing up my data/hard drive. The drive is now sitting quietly.. awaiting the operators command to reformat.. then install a fresh NON-beta distro. oh well, I didn’t want that data anyway.
you may read my bugzilla report if you want more laughter.
http://qa.mandrakesoft.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7137
Is the 64bit version even final? The standard 9.2 runs sweetly on my dual celeron board. Of course I’ve seen so many different people have weird issues with linux distros that I’ve never seen. Part of it always is because of the hardware they’re running, or just some weird configuration that they have. And of course in some instances they’re just idiots
Mandrake 9.2 is a dreadful distro anyway. It’s the most unreliable distro I’ve ever used. It has “perpetual swaps” (ie. endless disk activity while the system grinds to a halt) which are unpredictable, lousy fonts, a bad emacs port and its packaging system is not that good. And the DSL connection wizard does not work. Avoid it like the plague.
Debian, Gentoo and Slack…
Said that, also I won’t touch anything that is RPM based. RPM just sucks, even if you consider Conectiva’s APT-RPM (as it lacks of an common configuration interface like debconf).
I use Debian myself.
Hello,
I find great humour in distributions claiming the jump to 64 bit is causeing them problems. I have my redhat 4.x Alpha disk some place (6 years old?) and it installed better than this. Linux and the supporting packages (applications) are about 98% 64 bit clean. It seems to me the vendors are trying to move from ia32 to ia64(AMD). In my experience they would have done better to start with the alpha or the (ppc 64 bit) and use that as a basis to move to ia6r=4. Also try the -PIC compiler flag. (mozilla).
O well, just an amused alpha user.
Donaldson
IA64 is Intel, not AMD.
This article does not make sense. He repeatedly claims that he had a “HARD lockup” that were fixed by rebooting. Rebooting usually does not solve software issues, it fixes hardware issues. If there was something wrong with Mandrake 9.2AMD; it should happen everytime, not randomly.
Further, the author does not appear to have ever consulted any of the /var/logs to determine what the problem was. He just blindly re-installs.
I don’t know crap about PCBurn, but this article looks like it was written by a MS Windows Technician – If you fail, cross your fingers and re-install hoping that the software will install something differnt the next time. In my book, to be qualifed to call a Linux distro crap, you must be able to determine what the problem is, and how to fix it manually. If you can’t read dmesg and make sense out of it, get off the internet.
(btw, Mandrake 9.2AMD may be crap, but, like many, so was this article.)
This dist is $100 and there is no download edition available. I didn’t download the cds… they were overnighted from france.
as in, the machine locked up hard. rebooting did not fix it… if you can read, you would have realised that the hard lockup occured as soon as X loaded, and would do so every time.
And, as you probably did NOT notice after reading an entire article on the installer… the entire article was on the installer. I’m more of a gentoo user myself… and NOT a windows technician. I’m qualified to call a linux dist crap and diagnose why a problem occured… I even went on to explain why the mouse configuration tool couldn’t possibly have worked. Did you READ the article?
Just because I called one $100 linux dist CRAP doesn’t mean they all are. Dont get all defensive on me. ^_^
the only things you have to wait for a broken fix to a broken install for is windows, most usually.
Hello,
I was unsure of the correct abbreviation for AMD’s 64 bit extensions to IA32 instruction set. So what are people calling it? Is Itaninum being called ia64? that seems wrong. O well, no dog in this race.
Donaldson
“ia64” stands for Intel Architecture: 64-bit, which is Itanium, as Itanium is the only 64-bit architecture that Intel has released.
AMD’s 64-bit architecture is amd64 or x86-64, depending on which documents you read and when you read them. 😉 I believe amd64 is the current “official” architecture name.
IA64 is Intel’s Itanium
x86-64 is AMD’s Opteron/Athlon64
I must agree that linux is still a little rough on amd64. I have very bad experiance with rpms, so I really don’t want fedora/Mandrake/Suse on here. I’m still running a 32-bit Arch install, but even the 2.6.1 kernel is havin issues. I will eventually try gentoo, but right now, their liveCD’s for amd64 won’t even boot on this machine, so I doubt I’ll have much luck.
The beta of Windows Server 2003 for amd64 did install just fine and seems to be working. Of course, even windows is missing tons of 64-bit drivers at this point.
So for now, I’m limited to a 32-bit windows xp. Man is it tearin ass on here tho.
I find great humour in distributions claiming the jump to 64 bit is causeing them problems. I have my redhat 4.x Alpha disk some place (6 years old?) and it installed better than this.
Linux was ported to the Alpha architecture *ages* ago; it was actually the first port to another platform. No wonder, since the Alpha-based computers are quite similar to the PC (I’m not taking about the CPU, but the memory controllers, bus systems, etc …), much more than e.g. SPARC or MIPS workstations.
Even the CPU ISA is different, the Alpha CPU is bi-endian, and is usually operated in little-endian mode, just like the ix86. Therefore the main difficulty was to make such that the OS and the applications are 64bit safe. So in this respect to port the ix86-64 architecture is actually similar to porting Linux to the ix64-64.
So why is it that the port to the ix86-64 is so much incomplete compared to that to the Alpha back then? Well, when the Alpha was ported to Linux, the Alpha workstations and servers had been already around for quite a while. The hardware was proven stable, the gcc was already ported to the Alpha even before the port began, and the Alpha is a 64bit only architecture, so there was no problems with binary compatibility with existing 32bit executables.
So the main problems boil down to two things:
– the hardware and software is 1st generation. The hardware is not bug-free. And it is not well known yet (no errata).
– Also a new port of the compiler has to be written. There is alot which can go wrong there aswell.
Linux and the supporting packages (applications) are about 98% 64 bit clean. It seems to me the vendors are trying to move from ia32 to ia64(AMD).
Perhaps not 98%, but surely more than 90%. But just as a reminder: 64bit clean doesn’t imply bi-endian clean or even taking advantage of 64bit.
In my experience they would have done better to start with the alpha or the (ppc 64 bit) and use that as a basis to move to ia6r=4. Also try the -PIC compiler flag. (mozilla).
Nope, as I said before, ix86-64 is little-endian, but ppc is bi-endian, but actually just used in big-endian mode. Also the architecture surrounding the ppc CPU is far to different to a typical PC. Copying from ix86 or Alpha port is much more reasonable IMHO.
And as many people stated, ia64 != ix86-86 (aka amd64).
As for the -PIC compiler flag, I don’t know what you want to say with that statement. Yes, you need to supply -PIC for some RISC architecture to be able to produce working code, when it is not needed for ix86. But this often enough just because some software is written rather badly, restrictions to a CPU architecture or even compiler bugs/restrictions.
O well, just an amused alpha user.
And not-so-surprised alpha, sparc, pa-risc, mips (big and little endian), ppc and ix86 user.
Max
I wasn’t trolling. I admit I was aggrivated, but after an experience like that who wouldn’t be? Also, I had no prior dislike of the company’s distributions other than a playfull tendency to refer to them as “ManCock”. ^_^
You seem to be missing the fact that it wasn’t quite the user friendly experience that they’re claiming you’re paying money for.
I would love to hear what you think I should be reviewing, by the way. I’m looking for an AMD64 linux distribution that’s comfy and doesn’t suck… I’m very much open to suggestions at this point. I’m even open to the suggestion that I would be better off with BSD…
I’m currently dual booting windows xp and 32bit gentoo. I need windows as a stable system to do schoolwork on while I’m looking for something better to run on this machine, but I’d much rather run a 64bit OS on this machine.
Before someone states the obvious that gentoo has an amd64 port:
Gentoo, my usual metadistribution of choice, isn’t quite there yet on AMD64 and doesn’t have a real 32bit environment to speak of other than some basic libs that allow you to run openoffice-bin, which currently will not compile on gentoo-amd64, and a few other things that one needs to have in a usable desktop. This support is a hackish binary install that in no way allows you to compile or install specific apps as 32bit.. Not being truly multilib capable completely removes it from the running, as it makes use of binary-only libraries and plugins impossible. For some people, it may be fine to use a web browser without flash, mplayer without windows codecs or realmedia support, not have wine or crossover for running windows applications and games, or be bound by any other limitation caused by this. I am not one of these people. On top of the binary-only issue, not being multilib means only having a 64bit version of something that you just might need a 32bit version of. Yes… this means your sexy new nvidia card will be unable to play any games that need to link to a 32bit glx library, which excludes pretty much every commercially released game in existance.
This sort of outcome will always be the case as long as you have Linux developers working on cutting edge technology. But hey, as long as you can get your distro to install on your 10 year old 286 you can still be superior in every way to everything else
Anyway, I hear the BSD guys are doing quite well on their 64 bit implementations. Probably because they’re a forward-looking solid team of developers who can work together, unlike the Linux community.
“Probably because they’re a forward-looking solid team of developers who can work together, unlike the Linux community”
This is what i call crap
Actually if you have multilib in USE= Gentoo/AMD64 will build gcc with multilib support — you can compile anything you want as 32-bit with -m32, just don’t do it using Portage or you’ll end up with a mess
FreeBSD is the best AMD64 OS I’ve used yet. I’m right at this moment doing a buildworld on CURRENT code that looks like it may have some initial support for IA32 binary compatibility.
But like it’s mentioned above, there are no fancy proprietary things like the JDK, Flash plugin, OO.org, and anything else that depends on Java. Nearly everything else in the Ports tree will compile. Some things appear to have some slight and occasional problems, like Evoultion which crashes every time I empty the trash, and GFTP which crashes every time I try to open a local directory. Seems to me that there’s a problem with a GNOME lib somewhere, but I wouldn’t guess as to which one.
Anyway, Gentoo/AMD64 is a nice start, but I found it unusable because the static GRUB can’t decide if it wants the SATA drive or the primary master IDE drive to be HDA. During setup it’s one, and during boot it’s another. One of the FreeBSD developers mentioned to me that SuSE 9.0/AMD64 works perfectly for him. I forgot to ask if he used anything Java-related with it.
-Jem
Neither my USB keyboard or mouse devices would work. I went to plug in PS2 devices before remembering that 2.4 and X don’t handle that kind of thing. No biggie, I’ll just reboot to get it to see my mouse and set up the USB devices later in the install, right?
Does this mean to say the if I plug in a PS/2 keyboard or mouse the 2.6 kernel will recognize them without a reboot? Or is his grammar just off and he’s really trying to say tht the 2.4 kernel and X don’t handle USB?
Yet another reason not to use Mandrake. What a crappy distro. ;P