On 10/18/05, cmetzler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <cmetzler@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hi folks, > > My motherboard failed recently. I'm looking at buying a new system, > and AMD64 looks sexy; and it's been around for long enough now that > I'd naively think the software situation would be fairly stable. > Is it? I've done some googling through the archives of this list, > and early in the year people were suggesting that a fair number of > apps still had trouble in 64-bit. Is this still the case? I use > Rosegarden, Specimen, Ardour and Audacity for the most part. Are > people using these apps OK on AMD64 platforms? > > -c > > P.S. For that matter, any advice on specific hardware (e.g. mobos > to look at/stay away from, in your experience) would be greatly > appreciated. Sorry about the problems with your systems. OK, so I've been messing with an AMD64 for maybe 5-6 weeks, probably half time. It's hard for me to really recommend it yet, but the results are recently pretty positive as far as I've taken them, which isn't very far: Note that I didn't start to get a really good kernel before last week. 1) I'm using an HDSP 9652. With the very newest kernels, in my case 2.6.14-rc4-rt7 - I'm running at 64/2 with no real xruns for two days now. (By real I mean xruns not created by doing things you would never do in a session, such as pulling 1394 cables, adding new devices, etc.) That siad my wokload has been very light and I've done almost no recording so it's pretty untested as of yet. 2) I've used almost no plugins, which is typical for me, so I cannot say that any of that works at all. 3) A lot of multimedia web stuff doesn't work. I have no idea if that's important to you. If you need it you can get away with something like Firefox-bin and much of it works. That's not 64-bit though. (Doesn't matter to me...) 4) The memory footprint of pretty much everything is larger so if you were used to 512MB consider 768MB or 1GB for equivalent operation. 5) Basic 1394 support is working pretty well but I don't know about FreeBob. I see know reason why it shouldn't work. 6) My main work is using Ardour and Aqualung. Beyond that it's just touch and go with other apps. As for distro I'm doing this on Gentoo-AMD64-2005.1. Fernando is working on similar kernels for the Planet, however he and I seem to be running into 100% different problems. To me that's a little scary as far as recommending anything, but it may be workload based...who knows? Obviously his job is much larger and far harder than mine. My motherboard is an Asus A8N-E. I used external 1394 audio drives, both 1394a and 1394b, both running from the same OHCI controller. I have a 250GB internal SATA drive of which I'm using only about 10GB so far... Hoep this helps, or at least was interesting. ;-) Cheers, Mark
