Hey guys,

I have a dual opteron 64bit amd server with 4GB ram and 1tb of space, i am looking for a good linux distro that supports this, can anyone recommend one and a link? I am having trouble finding one that supports 64bit, and is not a suse enterprise edition or rh a3 version.

thank you.

I believe Gentoo or Debian will support this, though you will almost certainly have to compile the kernel yourself. We are currently evaluating both as replacements for redhat now that it is EOL. So far we have found the free forum based support for gentoo to be more helpfull that redhat.

Gentoo is still considered beta, and the little I have heard about them its not quite perfect yet.

Redhat and Suse are the only 2 major players afaik. If you have such a serious machine, why are you even considering skimping out on the OS?

Gentoo will out perform RH and suse any day of the week. RH does not compare.. People use Redhat because of the name alone. It's like buying brandname food to generic.. usually tastes the same but you need that name. Gentoo optimizies to your specific hardware. MySQL benchmarks compared to any other linux distro is incredible. Where do you see gentoo still being beta anyways? I ran it for one of our shell servers for around 8 months. Never had a problem with it.

FreeBSD supports AMD64. :)

Gentoo is officially available for five architectures, and has experimental support for three more. The official architectures are x86 (including all subarchitectures, like Pentium, Athlon, etc.), sparc (both Sparc32 and Sparc64), ppc (PowerPC), hppa and alpha. Experimental support is available for amd64, ia64 and mips.

Read the site, I would understand "Experimental" as a beta period. Any way you cut it, Gentoo is NOT a production run software. it's an enthusiast build.

Don't get me wrong, I find gentoo nothing short of amazing. For anyone looking to use linux for thier desktop, learn linux, or generally tinker its the best around. But, if your a production enviroment enterprise class company there is a huge list of reasons to pick a commercial package. The same things that make Gentoo so great and powerfull are the same things that keep it out of high end commercial solutions. The right tool for the right job, Gentoo is quite amazing but I wouldn't run it on a $80K database server. Being the poster just droped 6 or 7 grand in hardware, I have to assume he's getting serious about something.

Stop being a zealot and open your mind. Just cause you have a 5% perforance gain on your system doesn't mean Gentoo is a one size fits all solution.

has experimental support for three more


Thats beta for 3, not ALL. Look at any benchmark, gentoo out performs RH in everysingle one. It's really no different than Fedora will be, as far as testing packages before they release. Except you dont have to deal with the dependency issues you get with RH's rpm "crap" because it's all source based. Try a couple os's out on a home pc see what you think.. Everyone has their own personal pref's. They all "work" just some(gentoo) work/perform better than others.

zealots

Correction, Gentoo (for amd64) should still be considered beta.

Gentoo rocks man, don't get me wrong, but its not always the right solution.

If you have a commercial machine, and something breaks, you need the ability to have any tech repair it, with common binarys. Building a commercial machine from source pretty much guarentee's a migrane headache for the next tech that comes behind you. If you just do a straight compile thats one thing, but customizing anything production class is gonna turn around to bite you in the rear if your more than a one or two man operation.

Thats why Redhat works with everything out of the box, its not because they are stupid, its because when you have a machine down thats in production, you can't mess around looking for your 3ware support, or scsi.. etc. I will take a 20% performance hit any day to be able to repair a machine without compiling, custom building, etc. Its easy to do the first time, its hard to do the second time, 2 years down the road, with paying clients ringing your phone.

The reason Gentoo outperforms RH is because Gentoo recompiles as it installs, which means all binaries are optimised for your specific architecture.

Originally posted by shpwned
zealots

Heehee... thats twice now. Wasnt that one of the creatures from the Zerg or Zurg or whatever on StarCraft?

Trader

PS. I know what the dictionary deffinition is, so dont bother explaining what it realy is...

Originally posted by rsanders

Thats why Redhat works with everything out of the box, its not because they are stupid, its because when you have a machine down thats in production, you can't mess around looking for your 3ware support, or scsi.. etc. I will take a 20% performance hit any day to be able to repair a machine without compiling, custom building, etc. Its easy to do the first time, its hard to do the second time, 2 years down the road, with paying clients ringing your phone.

I would tend to disagree.. We were not able to get an RS-12 arraw working at all under redhat, after a week of trying we tried it on Gentoo... suprise suprise it didn't work either, but it only took us an hour of searching their massive support forums to get the answer we were looking for. I do agree that it is bleeding edge, but I don't think that warrants throwing it out as a production platform, it's simply different than redhat. The skills to maintain and install are no different than any other advanced linux skills that are needed to manage any other platform. Think about FreeBSD.. It's more difficult to install, configure and manage than redhat, but many companies are using this in production.

I tend to believe that it isn't the age of the product that matters, it's the support for it that counts.

Well, another story. Client had a redhat 9 machine. Something was wrong with apache 2.0. It was running the machine out of its gig of ram, and the 2 gig swap file, then sitting there nearly locked up.

Spent a few hours troubleshooting and decided to roll back the software just to see what it did.

Droped redhat 7.3 on a disk on another machine, different chipset, different hardware entirely.

So, we shut down the problem machine, pulled the OS drive hot-swap bay, slid in the new os and powered up. It took one run of kudzu for the chipset, network , etc.. , and our 1.5 terrabyte 3ware array was detected off the bat. It took a total of 20 minutes to completely swap the OS on that machine and mount the array and put it into full production.

20 minutes to build a Gentoo machine? Ya right. Plus the fact we built a OS for a dual AMD on a single PIII host, and reconfigured on the fly while it ran. The machines ran great since with absolutly no tweaking and no compiling. Its a large distrobution machine, 800 gigs of content files serving several other front end machines. Downtime to compile a new OS or even packages was not an option.

I never did find out what the problem was in apache 2, but I've seen it on a few 30+Mbps machines serving large files. Its had 100% uptime since that issue, about 3 or 4 months without one single aleart.

Considering you have 4gb of ram and 1tb of space, a 2.2ghz processor isn't worth a damn.

I'm only arguing that redhat is no longer a viable 'free' alternative for server platforms. Sure, you can pay for 3rd party support, but you can also still get 3rd party support for NT 4.0; That still doesn't make it a reasonable alternative to Win2k or 2K3. What will customers say when they see a host running 'obsolete' software?

With the new pay for play version of redhat, I foresee support and drivers going down the tubes, as the install and support base will practically vanish overnight.

EOL is coming fast... :confused: