FreeBSD on AMD64 3000+ - amd64 or i386 version of FreeBSD?

[Roland Smith]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2005 at 12:11:30PM -0500, Mark Kane wrote:
> 1) I have an AMD64 3000+ processor. I've been reading some things around 
> the Internet about ports and other software not compiling properly with 
> the amd64 version of FreeBSD. Most of the things I've read about this 
> have been from 2004 or even late 2003, so I'm wondering how things have 
> progressed since then. Are there still many ports or software that don't 
> compile properly? Is there a list somewhere of known ports not to work 
> on the amd64 version?

You could check the ports marked BROKEN for a connection to amd64:

cd /usr/ports
find . -name Makefile |xargs grep 'BROKEN.*amd64'

> Here is a short list of main things I will use this PC for:
> IRC (X-Chat, maybe irssi)

X-chat works fine on my amd64 box.

> Web Browsing (Mozilla Firefox)

Firefox works.

> Media playing (XMMS/VLC/mplayer)

Mplayer & xmms work, don't know about VLC.

> Email (Mozilla Thunderbird)
> Audio Streaming/Recording (streamTranscoder, streamripper, sc_trans maybe)
> BitTorrent (Azureus)

Haven't tried these.

> Audio/Video Encoding (lame, oggenc, various video encoding tools)

lame and oggenc work.

> Basically I'm wondering opinions on either the i386 or amd64 version of 
> FreeBSD for my hardware for FreeBSD 5.4. Which works better? For what 
> reasons? Are there any other caveats?

I've never had problems with my MSI NEO FSR mobo with K8T800 chipset
(MS-6702), from 5.3-RELEASE to 5.4-STABLE.

> 2) Will my hardware work properly with the amd64 version? I see my 
> motherboard (Giga-Byte GA-K8NS Pro) is listed as "Functional" on the 
> FreeBSD amd64 motherboard page 
> (http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/amd64/motherboards.html).

Some parts of NForce chipsets don't seem to work very well. See the
mailing list archives.

> My other hardware includes:
> 
> Sound Blaster Augidy 2 Platinum

Should work with the 'snd_emu10k1' kernel driver.

> GeForce FX5600 (MSI)

Should work with the standard 'nv' driver from Xorg. No accellerated 3D,
though.

> TDK VeloCD 40x12x48 CD Burner
> Sony DRU500A DVD Burner

ATAPI drives should work fine.

> 3) I know of a couple applications that don't build on the amd64 such as 
> linux-firefox and Azureus. Does anyone have any info on when there might 
> be versions compatible with the amd64, 

Basically, when someone is interested enough to fix the breakage.

> or if there is any other software 
> like them that would work with the amd64 version (main concern is flash 
> on websites)?

There is a open source flash plugin. See gplflash.sf.net It's in ports
as libflash-0.4.13 and flashplugin-mozilla-0.4.13.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith (http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/) Please send e-mail as plain text.
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