Pete, I'm eagerly awaiting the 24th, when Suse Professional 9.0 for AMD64 will ship. Mandrake is currently in beta, and RedHat Enterprise 3.0 will have AMD64 support, and ships "in the middle of October" too. Perhaps I should say: Athlon64 support. Yes, there've been Opteron distributions available for a while now, but my sense is that these imminent releases are the equivalent of "XP", in a way.
They'll focus on supporting the various Athlon64 motherboards will all necessary device drivers, contain nVidia and ATI video drivers from the get-go, etc. Stuff that desktop users want, including good video + audio support, etc.
Interesting to note that in the Suse case, they are pricing the AMD64 distribution a good deal more than the 32-bit basic.
And yes, I realize I could screw around and attempt to piece together my own distribution & drivers and not pay anything, but I hate that crap. Also, I want to see how easy it is to use, out of the box, to properly judge the pressure this will put on MS.
I'll post a report sometime next week when I've installed it.
I tried downloading a Mandrake beta, but I needed to use text-mode install (no Radeon 9800 support built into the installer, I guess), and even that acted strangely and locked up before completing the install. I'm running a 3200+ Athlon64 on the MSI Neo board (Via K8T800 + VT8237 + support chips). I hope I have better luck with the released Suse product. Since this is basically one of 2 platforms for Athlon64 (the other being nVidia nForce3-based), I'm assuming they've tested with it.
Doug |
