Re: Slackware x86 compatibility

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Author: Carl Parrish
Date:  
To: plug-discuss
Subject: Re: Slackware x86 compatibility
Kevin Brown wrote:

>> I was looking at the Slackware website and saw that x86, Alpha, and
>> SPARC
>> were the only CPU platforms under which it ran. I was wondering whether
>> newer 64-bit systems, such as the AMD64 and Itanium would be compatible,
>> since its supposably still x86. Can Slackware run on x86/64-bit
>> systems?
>
>
> It should have no problems running on the AMD64 processors, but
> Itanium uses its own 64-bit instruction set and while I believe it
> offers some support for x86, it does so with software emulation that
> is not too good. RH has a version compiled and optimized for Itanium
> as should Gentoo or Debian.
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I would like to point out that while SUSE runs on AMD64 I have been
having lots of problems with older lib and applications that simply
aren't ported over to AMD64. To be fair SUSE has come out with 9.0 (and
9.1???) which are supposed to have much better support of AMD64. So a
lot of my problems are proably tied up in the fact that I'm stuck on
8.2. However I've had to learn a lot more about porting code in the last
week or so than I ever thought I would (in the long run proably a good
thing). Until recently I had never been bitten by the "Linux has too
many distro's arguement." Now I have and can say its a valid arguement.
When I call a vendor to ask if they have a Linux version of their code
and they ask me which distro I have I answered "SUSE 8.2" I should have
pointed out that it was on x86_64. That burned me. Zend Optimizer isn't
available for AMD64 yet. Several tools I use on a regular basis aren't.
On the plus side since this *is* Linux. I can fix all of the issues (but
it has taken time).

--
Carl Parrish()
http://www.carlparrish.com
--
Registered Linux User #295761 http://counter.li.org

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