Sofar, I’m disappointed by the 64-bits experience. For starters, Solaris 10 would not even boot the DVD. Not the normal Solaris 10 DVD, nor the Solaris Express (latest build). The Express version got a little farther in the boot process, but gave up with some error too.
Ubuntu amd64 works. But that’s about it. I installed it on a different partition (duh!) but had to manually add it to the grub config of my 32-bit installation. If the install is recognizing my 32-bit installation and offers me to import my settings (which it did brilliantly) why not add the boot image to grub?
Firefox and Thunderbird2 are NOT in the Feisty AMD64 repositories. Getting them compiled from the sources is not for the faint of heart. It’s not a matter of “./configure;make“. You need to install many development libraries, create config-files (for which there are no examples in the tarball). Eventually I got the Gutsy (Ubuntu 7.10) sources working (not the standard tarball). For Firefox I installed Swiftweasel (the Epiphany browser does not even show its address and buttonbar), an optimized unbranded version of Firefox.
The soundcard on my motherboard (7.1 C-Media) is not supported (well). At best I get sound without the ability to control the volume. So I disabled the onboard soundcard and plugged my old Sound Blaster Live!1024 back in. It goes without saying that this card is properly supported.
More and more consumer PC’s and laptops have AMD Athlon64 X2 or Intel Core 2 Duo processor, both of which are 64-bits. If the 64-bits support will remain on this (Ubuntu) level, I can see a lot of happy Linux users switching BACK to a Microsoft OS. Don’t worry, I will not, but Vista has proper 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
So tell me, If Ubuntu amd64 is not the way, which Linux distro is?
BTW Very NOT disappointing is the performance of Ubuntu64. Things run just a little smoother than the 32-bits version. But it can be that 32-bit applications runs slower on a 64-bits processor. And of course the big version recognizes all of the 4GB of memory instead of only 3.5.