[PlanetCCRMA] How is 64-bit? Want to run CCRMA from a ram disk.

[Tracey Hytry]

> I've been using 32-bit Fedora 8 + CCRMA for some time now, and I'm  loving it. 

> I am thinking about the 64-bit version, for a specific reason.

> PS - I currently have the computer booting from a USB thumb drive, so 
> it's already near silent. But, the thumb drive is slightly slower than 
> running from a hard disk, so I'm looking around for other solutions.

I don't think that I can help you much, but I can offer you some of my experience:

I've had a amd(dual core) machine for over a year now that seems to work fine with the 64 bit version of fedora 7.

The machine has 8 gigs of ram in it and I love the way it acts.  If I start up a program and quit it, there's a very good chance that the kernel will be leaving it cached in ram;  so when I want to start it again it's almost instant.  The planet apps work real well on the machine, but as I said, it's a year old and fedora isn't supporting fedora 7 any more.  There is also a minor problem with using 64 bit;  there are a number of apps that won't run at 64.

I've been experimenting with fedora 9 on the above machine, along with a couple of others that are amd athlon64 with one and two gigs of ram.  On these other two machines I have managed to get the fedora 9 32bit version of most everything working pretty well, with a little tweaking here and there.

Now back to the 8 gig machine. 
It has an sli graphics card in it, and it seems that because of the new xorg in fedora 9;  the x window system is very unstable.  There are no good graphics drivers for that system.  I did do some experimenting with it and tried loading 32 bit fedora 9 on it and got decent results using a PAE kernel,  within the confines of having lousy video drivers for it.

As for using fedora 8 with more then 4 gig of ram?  I think going with lots of ram is very good, ram costs little now and having a lot makes the machines very snappy when loading apps that have been used before during the session on the machine.  I've hardly ever ran into using swap and lots of cool games can be played with the ram, like ram disks etc.  Just remember that fedora 8 support goes away in a few months though.