He has a good point. I tend to recommend Ubuntu to Linux newbies,
because it is (allegedly) easy to set up and run. But I don't want to
use it myself. My **PERSONAL** choice is Fedora, if you're going to try
several (why not, they're all free!!) put Fedora on the list. Or CentOS,
it is quite similar, but a little more stable and less bleeding edge.
Jim Hartley
Chris Knadle wrote:
On Monday 16 March 2009, Jack Chastain wrote:
...
The CPU is listed as: "Intel Core2 Duo processor E7400". I searched
this a bit and it appears (thought I am not at all certain) to be a
64-bit CPU.
I downloaded Ubuntu 8.10 last night, but this morning noted the
file name is "Ubuntu-8.10-desktop-amd64.iso"
That "amd" part concerns me.
Don't let that worry you -- the amd64 version is the correct version.
ia-64 essentially means "Itanium 64-bit" and won't work with standard
64-bit Intel or 64-bit AMD CPUs. It's unfortunate that the
nomenclature lends to this confusion.
Two questions for anyone: Is this CPU in need of the 64-bit or
32-bit Ubuntu package, and if 64-bit, is the above listed file
appropriate?
The Core2 Duo can run either 32-bit or the amd64 64-bit version, but
not ia-64, at least as far as I know.
(It is really weird - Dell's first page for Open Source systems
shows a desktop system with Ubuntu all over it, but they presently
only sell Ubuntu-loaded laptops. Sigh.)
I will also take any alternate advice on the "proper" Linux for
this system.
The "proper" Linux is the one that you like, are most familar with,
understand, and can keep up-to-date. Ubuntu is relatively easy to
keep up-to-date and so is probably a good place to start, however the
best thing I can suggest is that you try several different
distributions over time to get familiar with a few of them. If you
click on a few of the distributions at http://distrowatch.com on the
right-hand side bar named "Page Hit Ranking", you can get a
discription of each distribution and links to reviews that can give
you an idea of what unique features each of the distributions offers.
-- Chris
--
Teen Angel - a ghost story - http://teenangel.netfirms.com
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