[Half OT]Re: AMD64 support: FreeBSD v.s. Gentoo

[Jorn Argelo]

On Monday 26 July 2004 20:41, jam man wrote:
> --- Björn_Lindström <bkhl at elektrubadur.se> wrote:
> > Wojciech Puchar <wojtek at tensor.3miasto.net> writes:
> > >> Does Gentoo or FreeBSD have better support for
> >
> > the
> >
> > >> AMD64 architecture at this point?
> > >
> > > what is gentoo?
> > >
> > > is it some new OS or linux distro?
> >
> > It's a Linux distribution, so I assume the question
> > was meant to be:
> >
> > "Does Linux or FreeBSD for the AMD64 architecture at
> > this point?"
>
> It doesn't really matter...yes gentoo is a linux
> distro. and its the only linux distro I would consider
> with the AMD64 architecture. I was looking to see if
> anyone here has used (or has knowledge of) both AMD64
> OSes' support and functionality for x86-64
> applications.

As a matter of fact, I just got Gentoo up and running next to my Windows 
partition on my AMD64. There isn't much difference between the two. At least, 
when building everything from scratch. I got no experience with packages or 
anything. Gentoo is just a tad harder to get up and running then FreeBSD is, 
but shouldn't be too much of a problem if you follow the documentation 
provided at Gentoo's site. 

One interesting point for desktop users is that Gentoo automatically compiles 
X.org as a dependency of KDE rather then XFree86. And I must say, my TFT is 
quite sharper then it was with XFree86. Further some minor things are added 
to the standard KDE setup, but they aren't worth mentioning. One thing I am 
missing is that you have an overview of what you can compile into KDE. Gentoo 
just compiles the base KDE with a few extras and further you'll have to 
continue to compile the other KDE things from the portage (same thing as the 
ports-tree)

But, on-topic, it's still a matter of preferences and what you're experienced 
with. There are no complete new features or anything. It's still just FreeBSD 
or Gentoo, but the OS just talks 64-bit rather then 32-bit. As for the main 
question, Gentoo or Mandrake or whatever distribution is all the same when 
looking at AMD64 support and performance, as long as you're using the same 
kernel.

Cheers,

Jorn