Hi,
I am about to get my first Itanium machine. Old clunker I got nearly free. Went to Opensuse.org and naturally there was no Itanium version of OpenSUSE available - why ? Novell has an Itanium version of SLES. Why does it not give it to the community also? It should be two way street between Novell and OpenSUSE otherwise it is a rip of 
Well there is an Itanium version of Debian so that’s probably what I am going to test. Anyone here using Itanium.
Best Regards
Kari Laine
Itanium is used by how many “normal” users? 1? 2?
Having an entire arch of the OS (this including binaries, support, patches etc.) for yet another architecture is just a waste of time, resources and bandwidth. Sorry but just no.
There’s not enough people as it is, spending more time and effort in porting it over properly takes them from existing projects where they’re more needed.
Yeah you are probably right - actually you are.
But it is already done - by Novell who should be an open source company. I probably try to get evaluation copy of SLES to test this machine.
It seemed to me that Itanium would be a dead duck when it did not take of as a rocket when it was first released. But it seems to me know that high end servers quite often are Itanium. I have seen HP mention that they sell quite a lot Itanium servers. All the old Itanium machines out there will end up at the hands of Linux hackers Now when I have read about the processor it seems quite powerfull - am I wrong?
I like SUSE I have been using it since version 6 or something before Novell bought it. It is the best distro there is.
Kari
> I probably try to get evaluation copy of SLES to test this
> machine.
or: “As of 2008, Itanium is supported by Windows Server 2003 and
Windows Server 2008, multiple Linux distributions (including Debian,
Gentoo, Red Hat and Novell SuSE), FreeBSD,[48] and HP-UX, OpenVMS, and
NonStop from HP, all natively.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium#Software_support
–
Conficter
Side Note:
Itanium was a “spelling mistake” of Intel. That was the first time they forgot about compatibility and jumped to a “so called” 64 bit super model.
However, they were shot on the arm by AMD when they released a 64 bit processor with 32 bit binary compatibility. Yes, Intel changed after that. It really proved the point that “monopoly” is not good and healthy competition is really good for innovation.
syampillai wrote:
>Itanium was a “spelling mistake” of Intel. That was the first time they
>forgot about compatibility and jumped to a “so called” 64 bit super
>model.
Actually, the first version of the Itanium processor had an i386
compatibility mode. That was however so slow that soon software emulation
was faster than the built-in hardware emulation and later version of the
Itanium completely dropped the compatibility mode.
I think the Itanium can be caracterized by very successful marketing at
the start of the project. In fact, before the Itantium, the high end
processor market consisted of the PA-RISC, Alpha, MIPS, Sparc, Power and
i860 processors. The annoucement of the Merced project caused the majority
of these processors to be (more or less) discontinued because the vendors
were either themselves involved in the Merced project (Intel and HP) or
they thought the resulting processor would be technically so superiour
that it would be no use competing with it. Only the Sun and IBM decided to
stick to their own processor architectures (Spark and Power).
Unfortunately, the Itanium processor took too long to develop and the end
result was too technically too disappointing. In fact, at about the same
time as the Itanium, Intel released the Pentium 4 processor range and in
many benchmarks, the Pentium 4 processors were faster than the Itanium
processors while at the same time, the Pentium 4 based systems were much
less expensive. So even before the arrival of the AMD64 architecture, the
Itanium had already taken a severe blow from which it seemed difficult to
recover. The arrival of the AMD64 architecture was just the last deadly
blow.
These days, the Itantium has just a niche market left of high end Unix
machines, mainly the HP Unix servers that have migrated from PA-RISC or
Alpha to Itanium. Even the high performance compining marked is moving
away from the Itanium.
Marcel Cox’s Profile: http://forums.novell.com/member.php?userid=8
I really miss the Alpha Processors, In some alternate reality they are the bedrock for the server space.
Cynical me decided many years ago that “cheap and nasty wins”.
E.g. 8086 vs 68000, which one had the more elegant architecture? Ditto for Alpha vs x86. And a host of other elegant architectures that have gone down the drain.
The problem is that in this space when you have more market share, you have more revenue to devote to refining the architecture and compensating for its faults. But AMD took a chapter from the Intel book and moved into the 64-bit space by maintaining compatibility, just as Intel did all through the x86 line.
I wonder if 50 years from now, processors will still have a real 8086 mode as a subset.
Unfortunately, this can’t be said for their sockets which Intel seems to change like dirty underwear 
I wonder if 50 years from now, processors will still have a real 8086 mode as a subset.
nahh, I doubt quantum computers can utilize 8086 modes using superpositions and entanglement. Or maybe they can, who knows… 
I think the mobo manufacturers encourage this. No reusing of CPUs, you have to get a new motherboard to go with that. Or vice versa. Ka-chink!
In any case I decided some time ago that I would regard the CPU and mobo as a unit and try hard never to separate them. It’s so finicky to undo the heatsink clips. And dangerous. I know a friend who ruined a mobo when the screwdriver slipped and scratched some board traces. I use a chopstick or wooden spatula to push down heatsink clips, just in case.
I bet there’s something going on with the mobo makers too so they can cash in even more 
Yeah, it’s a delicate process. It was a horror with old Athlons and I too have broken a few of them by accidentally pushing the sink a bit too much and oops, the unprotected Athlon core broke in two :\
The only time I try to remove processors from Mobo is Salvage attempts. I love the idea of someone giving me 20 broken desktops and getting a few of them operational. >:)