Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-amd64 (278 mails)

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Re: [suse-amd64] POLL: Do you have a positive impression on the 64-bit platform ... plz drop a note on the hardware you use
  • From: Dabe Murphy <dabe@xxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 22 Sep 2004 00:52:30 +0000 (UTC)
  • Message-id: <4150CCC2.1010509@xxxxxxxx>
Johan Nielsen wrote:

Subject: [suse-amd64] POLL: Do you have a positive impression on
the 64-bit platform ... plz drop a note on the hardware you use

Originally I thought "Great, there goes the signal-to-noise ratio" but since we're all comparing the size of our tools, I guess I'll throw in my two cents after all:

Shuttle XPC SN85G4v2 (Small Form Factor)
Athlon64 3200+ CPU
nVidia nForce3 150 chipset (Flawless!)
250GB SATA HDD (8MB cache)
ATI Radeon 9200 GFX Card
2x512MB DDR400 RAM
DVD+/-RW
SuSE 9.1 Personal (2.6.8.1 kernel)

All in a chassis no bigger than a shoebox!

With a dozen years of Unix experience, SuSE has rapidly become my favorite Linux distribution. For starters, I had no problem booting off the SATA drive; I'm not using the soft RAID, just a simple single HDD.

Even YaST has managed to sway a dyed-in-the-wool "text file and command line" bigot like myself; "sudo yast sw_single foo-app" makes it almost TOO easy sometimes!

The only problems I've had with the machine are:

- Radeon drivers lag current kernels. Fie on ATI!

- I've also got a Shuttle PN15 802.11g WLAN antenna, which is based on the Prism54 USB chipset. Sadly, Linux support for that driver hasn't been completed yet. :'-(

(This is why I track the latest kernels. See above.)

- The box runs *HOT!* "sensors" reports that my CPU is 70C!!! I'm wondering if the VAR from whom I bought it may have applied the "Ice Pipe" liquid-cooled heatsink incorrectly. But after 3 months of solid use, I've yet to have any problems with it, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

- I also have a Wacom Graphire graphics tablet which doesn't seem to work. I'm GUESSING the driver isn't 64-bit clean, but I'm not sure. If anybody else has gotten their Wacom graphics tablet to work under SuSE AMD64, please let me know. [Email me; I'll summarize to the list].

--
Dabrien "Dabe" Murphy
Sr. Systems Administrator
Parabon Computation, Inc.
www.parabon.com

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