How is Gentoo with x86-64?

Stu L Tissimus · Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2003 5:52 am Post subject: How is Gentoo with x86-64?

I have finally decided that I'm going to get a new laptop. My current one, a Thinkpad, 500 Mhz PIII w/ 128 MB RAM and a bunch of errors unrelated to Linux, is almost okay but a bit too slow for the stuff I like to do. So... I've finally decided to get a Hypersonic Aviator AX6. I want to get a laptop that is good for games but also has good battery life. The AX6 has a Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro and... get this... An AMD Athlon 64-m. It has very nice battery life, and is quite powerful. However, how is Gentoo's support of the x86-64 architecture?

I'm currently in middle school, going into high school next year (NOTE: Trust me, I do a heck of a lot more on a computer than you would expect of somebody from my age group. So I need a powerful laptop.), so my main purposes for my laptop are for taking notes, playing some games (so I'll just dual-boot) and using an uber cool looking X11 desktop :twisted:

. So, in other words, I want to use Linux for just about everything but games (however, I've downloaded WineX... Hey, I might not need to dual-boot after all!), including stuff like The Gimp, some Python/C++ (and some basic hello-world Java since my school is teaching it this year... >_<) programming, all of which I want to use in a nice looking desktop. Yeah, I think I've made my point. Sorry if I repeat stuff a lot... It's the one reason I suck at essays and almost failed my english class this year.

WAIT! I totally forgot to say what I want to know. This laptop will be very important to my work at school and my own programming (and some guitar tabs, too). Does Gentoo support x86-64 enough to qualify it as a stable architecture?
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Stu L Tissimus · Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2003 3:30 pm Post subject:

Ka-bump.
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jsc1959 · Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2003 3:43 pm Post subject:

Running gentoo-amd64 now... works great...still in early stages but its getting better all the time! Check out the #gentoo-amd64 on irc..gotta love irc.

Stu L Tissimus · Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2003 3:49 pm Post subject:

Oh, really? Nice.

Is it on Freenode?
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jsc1959 · Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2003 3:56 pm Post subject:

yeah...

On another topic...the 9600 drviers are not well supported on xfee yet though I believe...at least on amd64 anyway...

Stu L Tissimus · Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2003 4:24 pm Post subject:

...Welp, I don't see why it wouldn't be stable. It'll just be using the closed-source 32-bit binary drivers.
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jsc1959 · Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2003 5:08 pm Post subject:

one thing to make sure of is to use only amd64 or ~amd64 in make.conf and dont use x86 or ~x86...it causes bad things to happen..heh

A good point of reference is Brad's web page at

http://dev.gentoo.org/~brad_mssw/amd64-tech-notes.html

good luck

sneakerski · Apprentice Joined: 14 Oct 2003 Posts: 168