mandriva 2007 -- 32 bit or 64 bit?

[RVDowning]

I first installed Mandriva 2007 32 bit, but now the 64 bit torrent is avaiilable (which I am currently seeding.)

 

What is the current concensus -- I have an AMD A64 3000+. Should I install the 64 bit version or stay with the 32 bit version?

[ianw1974]

I'd say stay with 32 bit, since there are some things that don't work in 64 bit - flash being one of them.

 

You can always test 64 bit and see how you get on, and switch to 32 bit later. But means a couple of clean installs.

[emmanuel_uk]

if you search for

"what to expect from 64 bits linux"

in this forum I posted a link to an article

it goes in ianw1974'd direction

and it is an intro to 32 vs 64, you can make your mind based on the article

[edwardp]

When I ran Mandriva Linux 2006 Free on my 166 MHz Pentium system, I had to disable some things at startup, turn off swap, turn it back on and add a "swappiness" line to one of the system files, in order to get it to run better because of the slow CPU.

 

With Mandriva Linux 2007 Free (a clean install - no upgrade), it ran fine on the Pentium right from the get-go. I haven't had to disable anything or touch the swap. In fact, when I run SeaMonkey (which requires the installation of libstdc++.so.5 in order to run on Mandriva -

urpmi libstdc++.so.5

as root in a Konsole window took care of that), it uses somewhat more than 50 Mb of the swap partition without any loss of performance.

 

When I press CTRL-M in SeaMonkey to open a new mail message window, the window appears immediately! With 2006, there was a delay of around 5 seconds before that same window appeared. This alone, is a major improvement! :D

 

I am very happy with 2007 and whatever changes they made to it, they are positive changes, indeed.