On Monday 05 September 2005 02:27, Mike Dewhirst wrote:
I just acquired a new Pentium 4 machine without any operating system and installed SuSE Linux 9.3 Pro via booting from DVD. To my considerable surprise I saw that the Apache2 webserver it decided to install was the 64bit version.
Does this mean I have 64-bit Linux?
Yes
How would I find out?
Well, looking at what kernel you have installed perhaps? rpm -qi kernel-default or rpm -qi kernel-smp depending on if you have hyper threading enabled or not. The bottom line will say x86_64 if you have the 64 bit stuff. But in general, if you have one 64 bit package from the installation, it will be the whole deal. The 64 bit distro contains 32 bit packages, but the 32 bit distro contains no 64 bit packages.
If it is the 64-bit version, in the interests of greatest stability as a DBMS server and web server should I be re-installing a 32-bit version. I have no investment in configuration.
I don't see why. The 64 bit stuff has been around a while, and is considered stable. If you have a third party database that doesn't play well with the 64 bit then perhaps, but the included things work well, and Oracle - although it is 32 bit itself - runs nicely in a 64 bit SUSE (although for Oracle you should probably be looking at SLES instead of 9.3)