It seemed a shame that a perfectly good board didn't have a post yet, so I figured I'd mention that my recent (and first) experience with 64-bit Kubuntu (or any 64-bit OS) has been great.
I'm running 8.04 Beta and sure, it's not quite cooked yet -- apt-get is downloading a pile of new changes each day. But there are no problems that I wouldn't expect with any pre-release software, regardless of the processor.
Before installing anything to this rig (an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+) I did a bit of background reading. Much of the material is now out of date, with worries about wireless, flash, limited software availability for the 64-bit platform. In my experience so far, I've not noticed any incompatibilities or missing software.
My wireless card, a Buffalo WLI-PCI-G54 (Broadcom 4306) was recognized by the b43 driver. Firmware was installed by b43-fwcutter, though I had to manually re-install fwcutter from the command line. For whatever reason, Openwrt.org was having troubles with traffic, and wasn't serving files reliably. But once I made a successful connection, APT installed the firmware drivers perfectly.
Adobe flash was installed without incident, as were all of the other trimmings part and parcel with kubuntu-restricted-extras. I did have to install mplayer and mplayer's mozilla plugin to get divx working.
If I'm disappointed in anything, it's that I'm not seeing significant performance gains with the application software. In particular, ripping and burning with apps like k9copy and k3B aren't impressing me with much more than I observed running Kubuntu 7.10 on an AMD Athlon/800.
However, the boot speed and the system overall is snappy, though this kernel is slower than the Gutsy one (as evidenced on my laptop, which has run 7.04-8.04).
I'm running 8.04 Beta and sure, it's not quite cooked yet -- apt-get is downloading a pile of new changes each day. But there are no problems that I wouldn't expect with any pre-release software, regardless of the processor.
Before installing anything to this rig (an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+) I did a bit of background reading. Much of the material is now out of date, with worries about wireless, flash, limited software availability for the 64-bit platform. In my experience so far, I've not noticed any incompatibilities or missing software.
My wireless card, a Buffalo WLI-PCI-G54 (Broadcom 4306) was recognized by the b43 driver. Firmware was installed by b43-fwcutter, though I had to manually re-install fwcutter from the command line. For whatever reason, Openwrt.org was having troubles with traffic, and wasn't serving files reliably. But once I made a successful connection, APT installed the firmware drivers perfectly.
Adobe flash was installed without incident, as were all of the other trimmings part and parcel with kubuntu-restricted-extras. I did have to install mplayer and mplayer's mozilla plugin to get divx working.
If I'm disappointed in anything, it's that I'm not seeing significant performance gains with the application software. In particular, ripping and burning with apps like k9copy and k3B aren't impressing me with much more than I observed running Kubuntu 7.10 on an AMD Athlon/800.
However, the boot speed and the system overall is snappy, though this kernel is slower than the Gutsy one (as evidenced on my laptop, which has run 7.04-8.04).
- never mind I turned it into a live usb stick.
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