64-bit recommendations

[squeech]

Greetings all,

I am building a system for a customer that at the moment has some very rough specs:

Dual Opteron (Probably model 244~246)
~2GB RAM
2~3 Serial ATA hard drives
Possible DVD+-R for backup purposes

And we want to load one of the 64-bit linux distros on there, but I'm having difficulty finding some solid info to compare them all. I know redhat has one, suse also. I believe gentoo has an experimental version for free.

What's the best/easiest for a dual cpu system? Any pros/cons between them??


Thanks in advance

[nukes]

I'd say Gentoo. Its all compiled from source and ALL the software availiable in it will be 64 bit capable.
Gentoo is always 'experimental' the same as debian unstable. Its because they're in active deveopment. I beleive Gentoo was one of the first to support opteron as it simply required editing one or two files to pass different CFLAGS and CHOST to gcc.
Also, with dual opteron, you shouldn't have to worry too much about compile times, it should go like a streamlined butterfly.
The downside to gentoo (for some people) is that you have to set a few things up manually if you want them. Such as X, servers etc. There's no GUI tools provided. If that's a problem you could use something like webmin.
RH and suse would probably do a good enough job, but with Gentoo you know its going to go.

[samwichse]

I'd say you might want to look at 64-bit releases of SuSe (you can FTP-install it I believe) and Fedora. As far as I know, Mandrake hasn't released an AMD64 distro.

Fedora Core 1 (test 1) can be downloaded here:
ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub...96/x86_64/iso/

Note according to their website they've marked it as a test release because they are testing hardware compatibility, not because of stability/bug concerns.

Sam