Best 64 bit distro: debian or FC3?

[ddutta]

Hi

I have a dual opeteron box. I need to run matlab, httpd, octave, mysql, postgresql, twiki and java. Which is a good 64 bit distro? I would like to stick to either debian or fedora core 3?

Debo

[imdeemvp]

Its hard to give a fair answer because they all are beta and it all depends on your hardware.

[Jman]

No experience in Debian, but you should be able to get all that to work in Fedora. Everything but matlab, twiki and java are included in Fedora, I believe.

No, they're not all beta, imdeemvp.

[imdeemvp]

No, they're not all beta, imdeemvp
How many of this linux distros do actually run their apps in 64 bits? Every review I've read claims their apps dont fully run at 64 bit and your a pc to actually meet the 64 bit capacity the pc has to be equipped with 4gbs of ram which most users dont have.

[bryancole]

on my FC3-i86_64 box, 64-bit gives a 10-to-20% speed boost to numerical calculations (done in python/scipy) over 32-bit versions.

NB. Python kicks matlab's ass in terms of interpreter speed, clarity-of-langauge, scalability and small-array performance. On large arrays, Python(+numarray) and matlab are comparable in performance. Matlab comes with nicer documentation and notebook-style GUI. I'm not sure if 64-bit optimised versions of matlab are available python on FC3 is compiled using all 64-bit libs.

[cybrjackle]

Currently Debian doesn't have a "stable" 64 port

http://www.debian.org/ports/amd64/

Ubuntu does have a stable 64 though.

Personally, I have tried the following under 64

Fedora Core 3
Suse 9.2
Ubuntu Warty
Gentoo 2004.3


I've been a long RH/Fedora user so I might be a bit biased :p

But IMHO, Fedora is the best on 64! Plus, looks like you want to run a server env. and FC3 comes with SELinux on by default so that is certianly a plus. Gentoo/Debian/Ubunutu is farily easy to get SELinux installed/enabled but Fedora certianly offers less headaches ( a lot less).

my $.02

[ddutta]

Thanks for the input. I am planning to use a 64 bit distro on 2 platforms

1. Dual opteron on a Tyan K8S

2. ECS 755-A2 + Athlon 3200+

I have tried FC3. Things work except matlab.

Regards
-D

[kacprey]

Few comments:
Instead of Matlab you can use Octave, the Linux clone of this application. It's on my FC3 already.
Java causes problems, for example the ways of installing Firefox/Mozilla Java Plugin from i386 doesn't work, and I don't know the alternative way yet ( there is a post about it here ).

[anand78]

on my FC3-i86_64 box, 64-bit gives a 10-to-20% speed boost to numerical calculations (done in python/scipy) over 32-bit versions.

NB. Python kicks matlab's ass in terms of interpreter speed, clarity-of-langauge, scalability and small-array performance. On large arrays, Python(+numarray) and matlab are comparable in performance. Matlab comes with nicer documentation and notebook-style GUI. I'm not sure if 64-bit optimised versions of matlab are available python on FC3 is compiled using all 64-bit libs.
:eek: Matlab and Python well I thought Scilab was all that was there as a Matlab alternative. But hey if we have Engineering toolboxes in Python I'll love to know about them.

[anand78]

What is Python?

Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language. It is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Scheme or Java.

What is Matlab

A mathematical programming language and environment, optimized for matrix operations

[Mossy]

How many of this linux distros do actually run their apps in 64 bits? Every review I've read claims their apps dont fully run at 64 bit and your a pc to actually meet the 64 bit capacity the pc has to be equipped with 4gbs of ram which most users dont have.

No, you don't need 4GB or more to take advantage of 64-bit Linux. If you have > 2GB, you've already hit the 2GB/2GB userspace/kernel split. If you have > 1GB for caching, you've already hit the PAE penalty for caching.

I upgraded my Opteron 148/3GB running PostgreSQL from RH9 to FC2 (and then to FC3). I got a 100% speed increase in my nightly backups which consists of dumping a 50GB DB to GZIP. CPU/memory intensive queries (aggregates, summaries, distincts) ran a shocking 50% faster. OLTP-type operations (insert, updates, selects using index) ranged from 10% to 30% faster.

[bryancole]

to Anand78, For Python scientific/numerical stuff see:

http://www.scipy.org
http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/numarray
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/
http://ipython.scipy.org/
http://www.vtk.org

I've also tried Octave and SciLab: none have notebook-style GUIs to match matlab. The lack of a nice GUI in python is more than compensated for by the great clarity of the language and the huge number of extension libraries (think toolboxes in matlab speak) available. There are also some excellent IDEs for python e.g. http://wingware.com. For building stand-alone applications, python is better than matlab (since you can use the GUI toolkit of your choice)