Hey i’m fairly new to openSUSE and linux in general. I recently got a Sony Vaio VGN-TZ37GN laptop. It came pre installed with vista business which runs like crap so i have been looking around for a replacement. A recent issue of the Linux Format magazine came with openSUSE 11 so i thought i’d give that a try and i’m highly impressed, everything works fine straight out of the box. The version i have installed is the 32bit version and my Vaio has a core 2 duo U7700 cpu which is 64bit capable so i’m wondering if theres any advantage to installing the 64bit version of the OS? Can i assume that the 64bit version will work just as good out of the box as the 32bit version?
Any help would be appreciated thanks!
The only reason I have found for using a 64-bit operating system is to utilize more than 3GB of RAM.
Most applications, drivers, plug-ins, etc. are 32 bit so you end up running everything in 32 bit mode anyway.
Not true, only a handful of apps I run are 32-bit and those are the proprietary ones like Skype. Even Flash is handled via a plugin on a 64-bit Firefox. OpenSUSE is well constructed to allow apps of both architectures to run at on the same platform.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Yup… I run 64-bit full time and it’s been fine, and I’m on an older
version of SUSE. 64-bit has been around for years… it’s time to
start moving that way full time. Open Source software has a bit of an
advantage here since building for 64-bit often just means recompiling
or, if there is more to do, you can do it without waiting for the
vendor. Anyway, another advantage of a 64-bit host is you can do 64-bit
virtualization. That may not be a big thing most of the time but I use
it a lot.
Good luck.
ken yap wrote:
> Not true, only a handful of apps I run are 32-bit and those are the
> proprietary ones like Skype. Even Flash is handled via a plugin on a
> 64-bit Firefox. OpenSUSE is well constructed to allow apps of both
> architectures to run at on the same platform.
>
>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
iD8DBQFJBSdL3s42bA80+9kRApFFAJ4lkaHak5JhybJaZOKVUJUGF5Qn4wCeP5vX
zAVeK84eu+0cOE10Fk5k5as=
=t2IR
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Thanks for the help everyone. The laptop only has 2gb of ram but i’m curious about the 64bit version so i’m gonna install it and see how it goes. Thanks again!
It’s not necessary to have lots of memory before you can run 64-bit. I run it in 1GB and the total footprint of programs running seldom exceeds 700MB. All the rest of memory goes into buffers and caches.
Um… what I read here is that the main advantage of a 64bit-system would be that it is 64bit.
64bit is the near future, no doubt about it, but unless it comes to fancy calculating-apps or pixaresque rendering-software, most users will not feel any difference today, would they? I’m just asking.
One of those “fancy calculating apps” is audio encoding. The Intel 32-bit architecture has too few registers. The 64-bit LAME encoder will do better. Ditto video encoding apps like Handbrake.
Better in what way?
Faster. Get your MP3s and MP4s done in less time.
Hokay, so I can rip faster when using a 64bit-sys. That is very nice and I’m looking forward to it, but is that enough to recommend a newbie to wipe his clean 32bit-installation to exchange it with a 64bit one? I don’t think so…
Don’t get me wrong - as I said, I do believe in 64bit, but when it comes to todays advantages of it… um. There seems to be quite a lot of mystery about it.
That was not your previous question; you moved the goal posts. You asked if most users would feel any difference, not whether it was worth it for newbies. 
Personally I just like getting all I can out of what I paid for the hardware. Any teething problems are just fun and don’t faze me. All you rest can make up your own minds. 
I stand corrected. In the early days of 64-bit I read articles that said all 64-bit would do is to support up to 16GB of RAM. Turns out 64-bit processors actually have a 64-bit wide data buss and process twice as much data. So, CPU-intensive applications will run faster.
Learn something new every day.