[Cialug] 64 bit difficulties?

[Daniel A. Ramaley]

I posted over a year ago[1] a question about graphics accelerators 
because i was contemplating building a new machine. Well, my main 
machine is 9 years old this month and i finally decided it was time to 
build a new one; the parts should arrive next week. It will have an AMD 
Athlon 64 X2 CPU. My question is, what difficulties should i 
realistically expect to encounter if i install a 64-bit distribution? I 
will most likely put Debian on the machine, though i'm still debating 
between stable and testing (just upgraded my old machine last night to 
testing so i can play with it for a few days first).

As for the graphics card i asked about earlier, i did go with nVidia. 
I'd really prefer open source drivers; i've enjoyed Linux' usual 
stability on my MacBook which has Intel graphics. But the consensus 
seemed to be that though nVidia is closed, at least they keep the 
drivers updated. So i found one fairly new but slow enough to not need 
a fan that is listed as Linux compatible and ordered it. I am a bit 
concerned that i'll have to replace it at some point though; i hope 
this machine to last as long as my last one did and even if nVidia does 
a good job of maintaining their drivers, i would be rather surprised if 
they continued to maintain support for 8 or 9 years. Hopefully by then 
either ATI and/or nVidia will have come to their senses with regards to 
open source, Intel will have released standalone graphics cards, or the 
Open Graphics Project[2] will have something on the market.

[1] http://www.cialug.org/pipermail/cialug/2006-May/005666.html
[2] http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Ramaley                            Dial Center 118, Drake University
Network Programmer/Analyst             2407 Carpenter Ave
+1 515 271-4540                        Des Moines IA 50311 USA