What O/S for AMD 64 ?

[rsbriggs]

I seem to have mostly acquired the parts to build an Athlon64 3000+ system. Other than possibly building up a Gentoo AMD64 system, anyone have any other suggestions for the O/S to use on this thing after I build it?

[IronBits]

Windows XP Professional ;)
you get a 'free' upgrade to the 64bit version when it's released end of April. :)
and while you are waiting, you can get a free copy of the beta 64bit version to play with :smoking:

[rsbriggs]

I meant "serious" suggestions....
:D :p

[IronBits]

:rotfl: I missed the part of 'real OS' :jester:
I think you will like the Gentoo stuff.

[QIbHom]

The next version of Libranet will have support for AMD64. A couple of the beta testers use it. I don't know when the release will be, and I can't say anything about the beta (as a beta tester, I promised not to), but I'd say sooner rather than later is likely.

There is also SuSE. And I believe that the Distrowatch search page, as of about yesterday, allows a search of all distros by CPU supported.

[Bok]

I have a few 64bit Gentoo systems which rock, I also have Suse 8.1 for AMD64 running on an opteron which is fairly good, though at the time it was cutting edge and some things didn't work well. It's much better now.

Bok

[Dyyryath]

Gentoo and Suse are both good suggestions. Personally, I'm a Gentoo guy, but I'm realistic enough to know that it's way more hassle than many people want to deal with to get up and running.

If you're ever looking for something more 'corporate', we're using RHEL 4 for AMD64 on several production machines and we're quite pleased with it.

For sheer ease of use and installation, though, you might give Ubuntu a shot. It's a fabulously easy distro to use, very polished, and has a 64bit version available for download.

[PCZ]

Dyyryath made a good point about 'corporate'

If you are an enthusiast go ahead try all the distros no problem.
If you want to pick up experience to help you find a Job then it is important to learn
Red Hat.

At work it is Solaris and Red Hat.
Solaris on the Sun kit and RH on the x86 kit.

The nix guys all have there favourite distros which they play with but the corporate policy is to use something supported on the servers.

Managers are frightened of using anything without support.
They see the support that RH offers as important.

There is a good Red Hat clone called Centos.
The latest versions are 64 bit, I was using it recently on a Server with EMT64.