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| Hardware considerations |
The latest
releases of the Linux kernel will have the best chance at supporting newer
hardware. Older versions may require downloading drivers separately and
introducing them during install. Thus the latest release of Fedora Core will
have the best chance of supporting the latest graphics cards and SATA chipsets.
Other Linux OSs which tend to include the latest kernels and thus the latest
hardware support, are SuSE and Ubuntu Linux.
Most PC
motherboard support two IDE connectors, a primary and a secondary. Each IDE
connector has a ribbon cable which can support two devices. A typical PC with
one hard drive and one CD-ROM can thus support two more devices. A jumper on
the device will set the device to be either the master or slave device on that
IDE connection. (You can't have both devices configured as master or slave on
one IDE ribbon cable, you may have a maximum of one of each.)
Also check the hardware
compatibility list before you begin.
AMD x86_64: The wonderful thing about this hardware and a release
of Linux compiled for this hardware is that it runs all your old i386 32 bit
applications. In order to run third party browser plug-ins for which there is
no source (Macromedia Flash, Real Player, ...) do NOT install the x86_64
version of the browser but instead, manually install the i386 32 bit version
after the OS installation. I run Fedora Core 3 x86_64 on an AMD Athelon 64 but
installed and run the i386 Fedora Core 3 RPM for the firefox browser. This
allows all of the 32 bit plug-ins to integrate with the browser and operate
successfully. One can also run programs compiled for i686 (/lib/i686/).
How's that for compatibility!! The Fedora Core 3 Linux release has /usr/lib64/
as well as /usr/lib/. You will also
find /usr/X11R6/lib64/ and /usr/X11R6/lib/
as well as compatibility libraries for i386 (i.e. /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-redhat-linux/...).
The compilers gcc/g++ will compile a 64-bit executable. Given the option
"-m32", the compiler will generate 32-bit executables. It's the
ultimate developers platform as well!! I even have no problem running some old
Red Hat Powertools 7.1 RPMs. Due to the native and highly integrated x86 32 bit
processing with new 64 bit extensions, there is no 32 emulation or noticeable
loss of speed when running 32 bit apps. The advantage of compiled 64 bit
applications running on this chip is the 64 bit addressability (64 bits can
address more memory and larger file systems) and handling of larger data chunks
with a single operation.
This information
should also be true for the Intel EM64T architecture.
