I’ve moved my workstation to my new AMD 64 with 1GB DDR400 RAM. The MB that I got is an MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum Deluxe. I’m very happy with the system and I’m running the 64 bit version of SuSE 9.2. I’ve seen little problems with the distro so far. There have been a few things however.

As you can see in the screenshot, xmms and a few other programs have display problems. I don’t know if this is due to something messed up with the 64bitness of the distro or not. I have a couple other programs that are like that too (zinf, another GTK media player shows similar problems), all are GTK based…hm…maybe a showing of SuSE’s lack of focus on Gnome in the past. I assume this will change as they become more integrated with the fine folks at Ximian.

So, instead of using xmms (for some reason the display isses bug me enough to look else where), I tried AmoroK, a KDE media player. While the interface is decent and the playlist editing is better than xmms, there’s no clear way to listen to stream without sharing them with the world. I just want to add my local NPR station feed and don’t want the world taking the stream server’s bandwidth.

I’d like to find a happy medium bewteen xmms, zinf and amorok – basicaly, something that works well.

I also added the latest versions of Firefox and Thunderbird. Since they are both the 32bit binaries which I downloaded from mozilla.org, they were looking for gconf2 in the 32 bit library path instead of the 64 bit one. A link solved issues with that. I’d rather not create the link however. So, maybe I’ll have to compile my own versions at some point in the future.

In addition to adding firefox and thunderbird, I did create and compile new RPMs for gaim 1.0.3 and gaim-encryption. The 32bit versions I had created for my PIII 800 machine running SuSe 9.2 didn’t want to install or run with some nasty dependancy errors weird…it was easy to create the RPMs again for the 64bit version so about 1/2 an hour later, I was IMn’ in 64 bits…

Overall, the experience on a 64bit platform has been great. The speed of the processor (AMD3500+) is great. I plan on getting another gig of ram in a fee weeks.