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Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Beta Released

Posted by Zonk on Fri Mar 23, 2007 02:28 PM
from the enjoy-your-irritable-deer dept.
Software Linux
vivaoporto writes "The Beta version of the popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu 7.04, was released today. Codenamed Feisty Fawn, the CD images can be downloaded from the Canonical Servers, and the final version is due to be released next month. Get it while it's hot! Read more about it on the official wiki."
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Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) Beta Released 50 Comments More /

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  • download speeds... (Score:3, Funny)

    by crazyjeremy (857410) * on Friday March 23 2007, @02:30PM (#18463067) Homepage Journal
    I'm at 130KB/s before this news goes public... I wonder how for it will go down after the story hits the front page...

  • Damnit... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Stormwatch (703920) <rodrigogirao@@@hotmail...com> on Friday March 23 2007, @02:31PM (#18463103) Homepage
    And I still haven't managed to give away all those 6.06 CDs I got from ShipIt!

    • Re:Damnit... (Score:5, Informative)

      by an.echte.trilingue (1063180) on Friday March 23 2007, @02:57PM (#18463615) Homepage

      And I still haven't managed to give away all those 6.06 CDs I got from ShipIt!
      That's OK because

      A) 6.06 is the long term support (LTS) release, meaning that it will be good for a couple years to come

      B) After the last upgrade fiasco, the Ubuntu devs are putting special care to make sure the update tool works this time, so people can just install 6.06 and then use the update manager to update to 7.04 if they decide they want it.

      C) They won't ship CDs of another release until the next LTS release, so there won't be any 7.04 CDs either.

      • Re:Damnit... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Markrian (931172) on Friday March 23 2007, @03:45PM (#18464419)
        Just to clarify, the upgrade process cannot skip interim releases. That is, to upgrade from 6.06 to 7.04, the recommended and supported path is to go from 6.06 -> 6.10 -> 7.04. See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes [ubuntu.com]

        • Re:Damnit... (Score:5, Informative)

          by an.echte.trilingue (1063180) on Friday March 23 2007, @04:23PM (#18464993) Homepage

          B) After the last upgrade fiasco, the Ubuntu devs are putting special care to make sure the update tool works this time

          Great, can they fix what they broke during my last upgrade? I haven't been able to get to my /home directory in months. At least I recovered from the upgrade before that; with the help of a Unix guru. Considering that I've had major problems with Ubuntu upgrades (one from Breezy to Dapper, the other a minor upgrade), I don't trust them at all.
          I see your thread: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=36143 3 [ubuntuforums.org]

          That is why I always suggest people not to upgrade unless they have a specific reason to; if what you have works the way you want it to, run with it.

          My best recommendation would to do a new install. That would (obviously) be faster than trying to fix the set up as it is now. If I were you, I would put the entire OS including /home (maybe partition so that you have 9gig to /, 1 gig swap, 10 gig /home) on your first drive (20 gig should be more than enough), and then during the install/partitioning step just mount the other HD in /media/storage and keep all your big files (movies and such) there. I'm on the Ubuntuforums if I can help you more just drop me a private message. It might take me a couple days but I'll answer.

          • Re:Damnit... (Score:5, Interesting)

            by PopeRatzo (965947) * on Friday March 23 2007, @05:15PM (#18465545) Homepage Journal
            You guys are scaring me. I'm in the process of putting a system together for UbuntuStudio (when it comes out) and now I'm hearing you saying stuff's broken. What's up with that?

            I'm dedicated to making an earnest effort with Linux for professional audio/video production. I don't want to be hearing about typos in config files and such.

            Look, I can still use the case, mobo, drives and memory I've gotten for this UbuntuStudio project for something else. Will someone here please tell me if I'm wasting my time or not? I don't expect installing and configuring Linux to be as easy as OSX, but I need to know whether this thing is ready for prime time, or at least ready to use as a secondary platform for audio.

            Is there anyplace I can find all these little problems I'm going to have to deal with to get Ubuntu to work? Or will these things even matter? I would like dual-monitor support, by the way. Do I stay or do I go?

            • Re:Damnit... (Score:5, Informative)

              by fimbulvetr (598306) on Friday March 23 2007, @05:44PM (#18465853)
              It's simply that the move from dapper->edgy was painful. Ubuntu made it _clear_ before hand that edgy was an "edgy" release. There were going to be lots of changes and no guarantees for some things. Edgy made a lot of progress, but it's "new" school. Upstart, UUIDs for fstab, etc, were huge changes.
              If you do a fresh install of feisty, you'll be just fine. Dualmonitor support takes a little (I mean a little) file editing if you have nvidia.

            • Re:Damnit... (Score:4, Interesting)

              by evilviper (135110) on Friday March 23 2007, @05:52PM (#18465959) Journal

              Can you actually sell ubuntu CDs that you download?

              You can sell GPL'd binaries, so long as you provide source code as well.

              That can mean you wait for someone to ask, then you ship them a CD of the source code for $2, or you can make it easy and just include source code on the CD, or on another separate CD along with the binary CD.

              Distros usually make it easy, by providing ISOs or packages of the source code for download. Fortunately for you, Ubuntu is no different: ftp://ftp.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/dapper/main/sour ce/ [ubuntu.com]

              <RANT>
              IMHO, Open Source on Windows isn't going to get much traction because of this... The GPL requires you provide source with your binaries, but most GPL'd Windows projects don't provide a source package... only binaries, and you have to go upstream, or look around for CVS/SVN instructions to create your own snapshot. Whether it's ClamWin, Cygwin, cdrdao, or most anything else, you've got lots of work to do to find the source code.

  • I've been waiting for this one (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rnmartinez (968929) on Friday March 23 2007, @02:31PM (#18463113)
    I must admit that Windows Vista almost got me. Its not even the eye candy, its just the thought of looking at something different from XP. I can't wait to go from 6.10 to 7.04, I've really enjoyed ubuntu since I siwtched to it from Debian. I hope that wireless and 3D is a bit easier in this release. I also heard that there is an applet that helps install media codecs, that should really come in handy too (Although I think easybuntu does this too)

  • new name, please! (Score:5, Funny)

    by fakeid (242403) on Friday March 23 2007, @02:35PM (#18463167)
    It's hard enough for me accept the name "Ubuntu", let alone their release names. I wonder if they could have a contest to actually make the version names somehow worse. I'm sure I would get a lot of street cred with the other IT guys when I tell them I run "Feisty Fawn". I'll have to make sure to wear my neckerchief...

  • still a long way to go (Score:4, Interesting)

    by eobanb (823187) on Friday March 23 2007, @02:42PM (#18463323) Homepage
    still a long way to go in terms of usability. A friend of mine recently installed 6.10 for the first time. He's basically never used Linux before. I briefly explained how to use Synaptic. He got the hang of things for a while, but then he interrupted a dpkg process when Synaptic was running by hitting the power button. I have no idea why he did this, but you probably know what happened...he tried to run Synaptic later on and it said 'you have to run dpkg update -a to fix these errors!' or something along those lines. Big mistake number one: it told the user to type in commands at the shell. Big mistake number two: it didn't tell him to use sudo.

    He was immediately stuck. He even figured out how to access the shell, but he didn't understand why it kept saying that he needed superuser privileges to continue. The problem with these kinds of things is that if even one little glitch happens like this, the user gets stuck and then usually gives up and goes back to Windows. It has to be perfect. It has to be flawless. Or else it won't attract brand new users.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by LiENUS (207736)
      Windows has those same issues, ever gotten the error message about the registry size being too small? How long do you think it takes a user to figure that one out on their own? Plus Ubuntu has great user support on irc.freenode.net in #ubuntu.

      • Re:still a long way to go (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Pausanias (681077) <oyyndcf02&sneakemail,com> on Friday March 23 2007, @04:58PM (#18465403)
        The problem is that he told the newbie to use Synaptic at all. Synaptic is not the right tool for newbies. This is the mistake experts make when trying to "help" their friends learn Linux: they tell their friends how to do things the complicated way, and then when their friends can't figure it out, they conclude that linux isn't ready for prime time.

        The proper way for a newbie to install software is Add/Remove programs right off the ubuntu menu... just like in fracking Windows, for Pete's sake.

    • Re:still a long way to go (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Oriumpor (446718) on Friday March 23 2007, @02:49PM (#18463463) Homepage Journal
      Cause a user never has had a corrupt office install and had to call on their sixpack of beer a fix friend to hack their registry and reinstall office.

      Shit happens, but yeah there should be an automated system to solve package issues. The brilliant bit is, you can submit a feature request to the ubuntu team and it might actually get implimented.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Danse (1026)

        Cause a user never has had a corrupt office install and had to call on their sixpack of beer a fix friend to hack their registry and reinstall office.

        The thing is, everyone knows someone who's pretty good with Windows and can help them with their problems. Five minutes with Google usually does the trick. How many people know a linux geek to help them with that? Probably not nearly as many. So, linux remains a daunting prospect for people who don't know who they can turn to for help.

        • Re:still a long way to go (Score:5, Insightful)

          by TheMeuge (645043) on Friday March 23 2007, @04:03PM (#18464767) Homepage
          Really? Cause 5 minutes on Google is what it took me to fix EVERY major issue with Ubuntu I've had thus far, and I have no Linux geek to turn to for help...

        • Re:still a long way to go (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Bogtha (906264) on Friday March 23 2007, @05:45PM (#18465877)

          he tried to run Synaptic later on and it said 'you have to run dpkg update -a to fix these errors!' or something along those lines. Big mistake number one: it told the user to type in commands at the shell. Big mistake number two: it didn't tell him to use sudo.

          The thing is, everyone knows someone who's pretty good with Windows and can help them with their problems. Five minutes with Google usually does the trick.

          When I put dpkg superuser Ubuntu into Google and hit "I'm feeling lucky", it took me straight to a page [ubuntuforums.org] where somebody had exactly the same problem and was shown exactly what to do, with a link to a tutorial as well.

          How is "five minutes with Google" not enough in the Ubuntu case?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by stim (732091)
      Its not really a long way to go. Ubuntu has already gotten way more usable and intuitive than Windows is or ever will be (try walking a noob though a registry edit). The thing is there is a double standard when it comes to linux, and that is that it needs to be perfect. Linux is and always be a work in progress, allways changing to incorporate the newest and greatest thing. This will always leave some little quarks in some of the process. It probably should have just put sudo in front in the error message,

    • Re:still a long way to go (Score:5, Funny)

      by Knara (9377) on Friday March 23 2007, @02:54PM (#18463543)
      Er... yeah, cuz Windows *never* gives cryptic error messages.

    • Re:still a long way to go (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Chandon Seldon (43083) on Friday March 23 2007, @02:57PM (#18463597) Homepage

      It has to be perfect. It has to be flawless.

      That better not be true, because it's impossible. But we know that it it isn't true - Mac OS X and Windows Vista are far from flawless, and yet people still manage to muddle their way through using those systems. In fact, lots of people manage to use Ubuntu right now even with a couple of bugs.

      The fact that it neither recovers in that situation nor gives the "correct" command to recover is legitimately a serious problem - I hope you filed a bug on it - but it shouldn't seriously prevent anyone from being able to use the system. Pasting any chunk of the error message into google gives the answer, as does asking anyone who knows anything about Ubuntu directly.

      Switching to any different operating system will be non-trivial, unless someone else is administering it. There's no way around that, however much people trying to switch to various Linux distros demand that it not be so. Ubuntu is well beyond the point where anyone can easily use it if they are willing to slog through the difficulties of learning the basics of a new system - and no new system can ever be significantly better than that.

      • Re:still a long way to go (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Have Brain Will Rent (1031664) on Friday March 23 2007, @03:53PM (#18464549)
        You're both right. It needs to be better and it can't be perfect.

        Here's my take on the particular situation the OP brought up.

        1. telling the user about the problem
        1A. it can detect the problem well enough to tell the user what needs to be done... so why doesn't it just ask if it is ok to do that and then do it itself so the user doesn't have to figure out how to type in a command.
        1B. if 1A is too much work then at least tell the user "you will need to type this in a window; you get the window by...."

        2. telling the user about privilege
        2A. It should, tell the user his account doesn't have the privilege necessary...
        2B. It should tell the user in words a newbie is most likely to understand, not "you need to be superuser" or something similar but "you will need administrator privileges to do this; here is how you can get them for the purpose of running this command". Administrator is a plain English word whose plain English meaning is exactly right for this context.

        I know, it is a PITA to explain every last thing to newbies, but if you aren't willing to put the effort in to do that then you will never win over new users... they will hit something like this, throw their hands up in the air and go back to something more familiar - whatever that is. That's human nature, it isn't going to change, you have two choices: get used to it and work around it or give up. That's all there is to it.

  • Newbie Question (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pinkocommie (696223) on Friday March 23 2007, @02:45PM (#18463389)
    I'm installing Ubuntu (Kubuntu actually, a KDE fan) for the first time, looking to migrate from SUSE. I got a copy of 6.10 and thought I'd use that and then do an in place upgrade to 7.04 next month (from what I read online it was a matter of issuing a single command). What do you guys recommend? A straight up 7.04 beta or 6.10 followed by the upgrade? I'm somewhat of a newbie with ~nix (but with relatively standard hardware). Thanks

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by drinkypoo (153816)
      I did an upgrade from edgy to feisty while it was very much still a moving target, days prior to the beta release and there's been packages flapping every which way - and the upgrade STILL appears to have worked with the possible exception of gnome-network-manager. I'm fairly confident that by official release time they will have it pretty well worked out. But the beta is working so well for me right now that I would just go ahead and go to the beta right away.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by voislav98 (1004117)
      You should try MEPIS instead of Kubuntu, it's also based on Ubuntu and uses a lot of Ubuntu packages but it's much better (as far as KDE environment goes). It's now in the release candidate stage for 6.5, so the new version should be out any day. It also has Beryl, codecs and video drivers installed by out of the box, no need for Automatix and such.

  • Beta People (Score:5, Informative)

    by LiENUS (207736) <slashdot.vetmanage@com> on Friday March 23 2007, @02:51PM (#18463495) Homepage
    Please, If you are new to linux don't run the beta version, Use 6.10 its much better and more supported. The beta is not intended for mainstream use. In the #ubuntu channel on freenode there have been people coming in asking questions about Feisty Fawn for months. Those people belong in #ubuntu+1. The beta releases are not supported by the mainstream support, don't install this and expect to be fully supported.

  • I did a dist-upgrade from edgy to feisty about three days ago. Nothing has gone downhill and things have only gotten better. I have had a few problems, though I write them off as transitional issues. After all, it was pre-beta software.

    My biggest problem has been with the nvidia kernel module. For those who don't know, you can make sure this is installed properly by doing:

    sudo aptitude install linux-restricted-modules-`uname -r` nvidia-glx

    This is all well and good but for some reason the nvidia kernel module was just randomly disappearing! No joke. I ended up using module-assistant (sudo it) to build my own nvidia module, which worked great, and got everything working again.

    There is a new restricted module manager which explicitly informs you that you are using restricted modules, which may not be supported. The system may have made it easy for you to install binary drivers, but it makes damned sure that you know you're using them and what the downside is.

    The network-manager gains zeroconf support in this release, but there's still no WPA options in the network-manager. I thought that was coming in this release? I have network-manager-gnome installed, but it doesn't look anything like this [chadda.se]. So I don't know WTF is going on. And I'm in the middle of installing a bunch of packages so I can't find out at this moment, either. The default driver may not support WPA, I wouldn't know, but my network-manager applet still is a pale ghost of what I'm seeing in screenshots.

    In general, what most beta users of Feisty are going to notice in comparison to Edgy is graphical. Various theme elements have changed slightly. The biggest change, of course, is the official inclusion of binary drivers, which is much easier to get working. You won't need envy to get those nvidia drivers working any more (assuming you were unable or unwilling to do the install manually, envy seems to have been the most common way to install 'em.) Envy, of course, does not support Feisty.

    Early adopters will note that EasyUbuntu and Automatix both still lack Feisty support. Way to test and be ahead of the curve, guys. But of course that's not Ubuntu's fault.

    This is a lot less painless than my last experience, attempting to upgrade a somewhat tweaked dapper to edgy. This system is no less tweaked, but the dist-upgrade went fine.

    • Re:Some thoughts on Feisty (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rutulian (171771) on Friday March 23 2007, @03:15PM (#18463943)
      The network-manager gains zeroconf support in this release, but there's still no WPA options in the network-manager. I thought that was coming in this release? I have network-manager-gnome installed, but it doesn't look anything like this.

      Hmmm, not sure what you mean by this because zeroconf isn't related to network-manager as far as I know. Anyway, your network-manager applet should look just like your screenshot. Are you sure you are running the applet? Type nm-applet at the terminal. Ubuntu ships another wireless applet with the same icon, but it isn't the network-manager applet. So make sure you are actually running the network-manager applet. And WPA configuration has been there for at least a year, so you should be able to see it unless there are driver issues with your wireless card.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by drinkypoo (153816)

        For some reason it wasn't showing up. I executed the following command:

        sudo apt-get --reinstall install network-manager network-manager-gnome

        Then I rebooted, then it appeared. I'm not sure if just running nm-applet would have been enough, or if I needed to do what I did, but it worked :P

  • Been running it (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AxXium (964226) on Friday March 23 2007, @03:01PM (#18463675)
    I've been running it for some time now as I've signed up as a tester some time back. I must say in the past I was a big Ubuntu hater as I am part of another Linux distro's admin staff. However, I gave it a spin and must admit, as far as polish, ease of use, stability and the latest software goes, Ubuntu is by far the ultimate "free as in beer" ditro in my book. My previous biased opinion was quickly shattered. In retrospect I wish I have tried Edgy.

  • mobo RAID support? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by postmortem (906676) on Friday March 23 2007, @03:07PM (#18463807) Journal
    Today, more and more people opt in for using home RAID arrays, primarily from free chipset controllers that implement RAID 0,1, (5) capabilities in software. It is free performance upgrade for anybody with more than one hard drive.

    For long time, no Linux distro would support this 'winRAID'. Then dmraid project was created at RedHat, and soon after, Fedora Core 5,6, SUSE 10.2, and RHEL 5 have installer support for it.

    Last I've heard that future Ubuntu releases will contain support for dmraid... does anybody can verify that is the case, that is Ubuntu 7.04 can be installed on RAID0 device created on onboard RAID controller?

  • Ubuntu is now automatically prelinked (Score:5, Informative)

    by sygin (659338) on Friday March 23 2007, @03:17PM (#18463987)
    This Ubuntu release 7.04 boots faster and is snappier than the previous 6.10. It no longer requires prelinking to increase speed.

    From the ubuntu forums:

    "UPDATE 1/2/07: Prelink is no longer necessary in Feisty. Feisty uses a new linking mechanism called DT_GNU_HASH which dramatically speeds up the linking process without the need for continuously running the prelink program."

    Another great improvement is hardware (esp. wireless and graphics) support.

    Now thats progress, each release faster and better than the last.

  • This is a true story (Score:4, Interesting)

    by 9gezegen (824655) on Friday March 23 2007, @04:21PM (#18464979)
    Two weeks ago, one of my friends called me. His in-laws were visiting them. Since they are Turkish, they will stay like 6 months with their daughter in US. In order to pass time, they often visit the local library to use internet and read Turkish newspapers.

    Now my friend found an old computer from his company (Pentium III, 750 Mhz, 20GB harddisk) that had Windows 2000 and thought that could save his in-laws a trip to the library. He connected it to his brand new cable connection (without any router). I had warned him earlier that he should at least install a firewall before connecting it to the internet. Of course he didn't listen me and it was the next day after the first run that he called me. Guess what, the computer started showing spam messages (I think that was the messanger bug), so he run an old antivirus program all day and couldn't find anything (the program never finished actually).

    Now, he was wondering how he can fix the problem. I said either use a free anti virus or let me install linux. Since he wanted to test drive Linux he opted for it. So we made a deal, his in-laws were going to prepare delicious Turkish food, and meanwhile I was going to install Kubuntu 6.10.

    At the beginning, the boot started fine. However, as soon as X11 started the screen went dark. I waited 15 minutes or so since that was the first time I was using Kubuntu 6.10 installer and I thought the machine was doing something. But it turned out that I had downloaded live cd (which had the installer). So spent an hour or so trying a few times, and trying install without going to the live system. I should have read little more, since apparently live cd doesn't have the regular installation options I was expecting to see (they had another CD for that). Anyway, after an hour or so, I had my euroka moment when I pressed Cltr-Alt-F1. Wholla, text console was there. Now, at least I knew machine was up but X11 had problems. So I changed X11 configuration on the live system to vesa and X started working. With the main bottleneck solved, I quickly started installation. The installer was kind enough to ask even if I want to create a partition for windows and let it stay there. My friend just said remove everything, so I just go and selected a few options and the machine was ready in 10 minutes or so. However, when it booted the next time from the hard-drive, it was again X11 with problems so I just modified xconfig file to switch it back to vesa driver. Now, I had a working machine with 800x600 resolution. A quick internet search showed me that the Matrox G250 driver that comes with the driver had a bug. So ubuntu forums had a discussion where somebody recompiled bug-free debian driver for matrox. After installing that, I had 1600x1200 resolution without any problem. Next hour spent on eye-candies. I installed firefox, created bookmarks to the Turkish newspapers, created some bookmarks to in-laws mail providers etc, added some weather and add blocking extensions. I also changed to KDE and Firefox themes to noia (to their dismay, since initially they wanted to have familiar XP interface which my heart didn't let me do it. I complained so much that they let me use Noia :)).

    Anyway, to make the long story short, the only think they wanted out-of box was Internet Explorer since some sites explicitly required it and Acrobat Reader. It didn't took very long to install IE (thanks to IEs4Linux) and Adobe already had acroread ready. My friend's wife needed an office program, so the obvious choice was OpenOffice. The final step was the installation of Flash. I also showed them how to use Adept so that they can install whatever they want very easily, and just added a button to kill firefox or IE , in case they had problems.

    Since then they are very happy with their system. My main concern which was running KDE on Pentium 3 750Mhz machine with 256MB ram was unfounded. The system is very responsive. I was wondering how long it would stay without crashing, and asked them to let the compute

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by pembo13 (770295)
      I don't know about Ubuntu, but I assume the following applies to it as well: with popular distros like Fedora, all you need to is enter the irc chatroom (irc://freenode/fedora) from any machine with internet access (it need not be the one you're installing Linux on) and ask your questions, clearly , but politely, and you're likely to get as much hand holding as is possible (limited to things like time of day since many people sleep)

    • Re:Are you Experienced ? (Score:5, Informative)

      by wile_e_wonka (934864) on Friday March 23 2007, @04:11PM (#18464867)
      I'm quite new to Linux, but decided to try out Ubuntu. I'm using Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy). I dual boot, and have been for about a year now because I have to use Windows mainly, for school.

      I found the ubuntu forums to be very helpful, and I also found the ubuntu guide (www.ubuntuguide.org) to be extremely helpful for the basic things that a new user would run into.

      As noted in these comments, you will need to get to know the console (command line) more so than needed in Windows. However, I have now found that I prefer it for many things. The other thing you'll need to get used to is not having root user privileges for everything you do, meaning if you want to do something not mundane (and sometimes even mundane things), you'll need to give yourself root privileges for that action (which in ubuntu is most easily done by typing "sudo" in the console before your command).

      I feel like I've become real familiar with how everything works by trying to add fancy things to the user interface (like a rotating cube desktop). Working on those fancy things, which is sometimes difficult (but easier now than it used to be) gave me the understanding I need such that doing all the basic stuff is now absolutely no problem. The forums and Ubuntu guide got me there.

      I will note, though, it is not like windows. It can't be--you just can't have it be as secure as Ubuntu and as easy to use as Windows (I'm sure that's why Windows is so hole-ridden; it was all in the name of useability). On the other hand, Linux really is a lot easier to use than it used to be, has good support, and can do things Windows can't (I really think my rotating cube desktop is awesome).

    • Re:Running Herd4 on AMD 64 (Score:4, Informative)

      by MooseMuffin (799896) on Friday March 23 2007, @03:06PM (#18463783)
      I wouldn't run the 64 bit version of any OS unless you really had a reason. Theres no 64 bit flash for any platform, no wine and plenty of other misc problems. Unless you have a good reason (> 4gb ram) then you're only going to run into headaches.

      • Re:Running Herd4 on AMD 64 (Score:5, Informative)

        by Compholio (770966) on Friday March 23 2007, @04:31PM (#18465093)

        ...no wine...
        While I'll admit that support needs to get better, you can still run Wine on 64-bit. For Ubuntu this means you need to download the ".deb" file for the Wine release and install the package like this:

        sudo dpkg --force-architecture -i wine*.deb

      • Re:Running Herd4 on AMD 64 (Score:4, Insightful)

        by kbahey (102895) on Friday March 23 2007, @05:30PM (#18465697) Homepage
        Your reasons are valid mainly for the desktop.

        However, on the server they don't apply.

        I have been running 64-bit on an AMD server without any problems (apart from a trivial quirk in PHP's PEAR/PECL which has an easy workaround [just add ini_set('memory_size', 16MB) in some script]).

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