21 December 2006

Ubuntu 6.10 64-bit release: Revisited

I finally installed this release after debating for a while.
I have to say, it's the best 64-bit GNU/Linux that I have ever used. Superb from boot up to shutdown :-)

It's by far the fastest Linux that I have used, very snappy and responsive. The ATI driver support worked really well, it installed fine and my ATI X1300 Pro works very well.
Support seems excellent, the documentation on ubuntu.com is really helpful.

So far, it seems much more polished than openSUSE 10.2 which I installed at the same time. 10.2 is pretty poor in comparison to Ubuntu 6.10.

I look forward to new Ubuntu releases.

Highly recommended.

08 December 2006

07 December 2006

Updated Apple 64-bit support

Apple Developer : Leopard Developer Application Technologies Overview

Above link has lots of information about changes for Leopard. Most of the interesting 64-bit stuff is near the end.

"Leopard brings complete 64-bit support to all of the Mac OS X frameworks"

30 November 2006

Linux: 64 Studio 1.0 released

Desktop Linux reports that 64 Studio 1.0, aka "Olympic, has been released. It's a Debian based 64-bit Gnu/Linux.

DistroWatch entry 64 Studio
64Studio.com link
64Studio Press Release

29 November 2006

14 November 2006

Windows PowerShell 1.0 64-bit

Windows PowerShell 1.0 for 64-bit appears to have been released.

Downloads for Windows XP 64-bit & Windows 2003 x86 64-bit & Itanium.
Download link

08 November 2006

More Vista 64-bit

Vista x64 build 5744 (RC2)

It's another improvement for Vista. Smoother & faster then RC1. It found all of my hardware again, and is working well. Installation was just as quick & painless.
I opted to reformatting the Vista partition and installed fresh.
The 3D stuff works well, it's a bit gimicky, but it works. I've found that most companies I've seen just switch to Classic, so a lot of those features will be lost on them.

Now that Vista has gone to manufacturing, I imagine they've done more incremental improvements. This build goes further in speed & seems more polished. It's still not as fast as XP on the same machine, but it's a good improvement.

28 October 2006

Ubuntu 6.10 64-bit release

Ubuntu GNU/Linux 6.10 released

There is an AMD64 ISO for both deskop and server AMD64 and are available at the download mirrors

Update: I could not install it. There appears to be an installer bug relating to "no root partition" message. It seems that the installer does not like to reuse a previous Linux OS partition and refuses to recognise it.

27 October 2006

AMD 64-bit chip lists

Here are a couple of links to AMDs list of 64-bit chips.
You can compare model numbers, cache sizes, thermal requirements, etc.

Mobile Turion 64 chips
Turion X2 Dual-core model numbers

Compare desktop chips
AMD 64-bit Processors for desktops

23 October 2006

Apple: 64-bit Leopard developer news

Leopard Technology Overview details some developer highlights from the upcoming "Leopard" Mac OS X 10.5.

The new developer tools like XCode 3.0 and xray (new GUI tool built on DTrace) do look impressive. There seems to be a large 64-bit update to various libraries and frameworks.

10 October 2006

News items

PC World - IBM Cranks Up Its Server Chip, Forthcoming Power6 chip pushes speed to 5.0GHz

ComputerWeekly - Itanium poses the 64-bit question

Computer Weekly - VMware offers 64-bit virtualisation support

The Register - VMware does 64-bits in full

Porting Article - Extend your application's reach from 32-bit to 64-bit environments

IT Business - AMD to push 64-bit computing with approved motherboard platforms

05 October 2006

News link: The Long Road to 64-bits

ACM Queue has an interesting article about the move to 64-bits

Article

27 September 2006

MS Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000

PS/2 to USB

I'd long had a PS/2 mouse (via USB converter) and a PS/2 keyboard. I liked the hardware compatibility with GNU/Linux & Windows, it seemed simple & without hassles.
In the past I've enjoyed the original MS natural keyboard, I had one at work and one at home. Since moving, I got a new PC last year and had the plain HP keyboard which worked well (PS/2).
I decided to try out the new MS Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000.
Instead of following the instructions, which mentioned requiring software installation prior to using the hardware, I decided to just switch from PS/2 to USB, plug in and reboot to see what happens.

I plugged USB mouse into USB (rather than use PS/2 converter) and plugged in MS USB keyboard into USB.

openSUSE GNU/Linux 64-bit : Just worked, it detected everything and worked fine.
Vista 5600 RC1 64-bit : Just worked, it detected everything and worked fine.

XP SP2 32-bit: nothing worked.

Neither mouse nor keyboard worked. I had to reboot again, plug back in the original keyboard & mouse and login. Installed the drivers/software from the supplied CD.
Switch off, change to new keyboard & USB mouse, booted, and still no joy.

Put everything back, rebooted, all working. So rebooted with original PS/2 keyboard and placed mouse in USB. Rebooted. Mouse not working but keyboard ok, so I logged in via keyboard. Then after a few mins, XP says new USB mouse found and it starts working.
Switch off, change to new keyboard & USB mouse, booted, and still no keyboard.

Switched back to old keyboard, kept USB mouse. Logged in, and decided to try plugging in the new USB keyboard whilst using the PS/2 keyboard.
XP then recognized the new keyboard, so I rebooted with just the new keyboard and usb mouse and all was okay !!

It seems the hardware detection in 64-bit Linux and 64-bit Vista is smoother than under 32-bit XP :-)

24 September 2006

Vista x64 build RC1

Public Vista build for x64

I think it was RC1 that I downloaded recently to update Beta 2 :-)

I downloaded the ISO from Microsoft.com and burnt it to DVD. I decided to reinstall rather than upgrade my Beta 2 x64 install.

The installation process went very well. It improved a lot since Beta 2, it was much faster to install.

The feel of this build is good. It's far more responsive, performance seems to have increased quite a lot since Beta 2. I had no stability problems. With Beta 2 I had lots of DNS issues, these have gone away with the new build. It seems better at hardware detection and found my graphics card without problem.

I'm far more impressed with x64 Vista than I was with Beta 2 but it's still not as fast or smooth as my WinXP 32-bit install on the same machine. My personal favourite MS OS is still WinXP Pro 64-bit.

08 September 2006

2 good programming tools

Runtime code analysis

Valgrind is, to quote the website, " an award-winning suite of tools for debugging and profiling Linux programs".
It truly is an amazing tool for running against your code base to detect all manner of problems, from memory leaks to 64-bit porting problems.
I really can't rate it highly enough, it is a wonderful tool. Read more about it here : About Valgrind. It's one of the best tools you will find for checking your code.
Version 3.2.0 supports 32-bit x86/Linux & PPC32/Linux and now also 64-bit AMD64/Linux and PPC64/Linux.
You mainly place it in front of your program when running to analyse it.
For example :
$ valgrind my_program my_args

Static source code analysis

HP have released a good free tool for analysing source code. It's the HP Code Advisor, or cadvise (c advise). It's a static analysis tool for checking C and C++ source code. To use it you would run it like this :
$ cadvise cc -my_compiler_opts source_code.c
and it reports on potential porting problems, coding errors, security risks, etc.
Version 1.1 is up on their website now.

05 September 2006

News: AMD 64-bit laptop pricing

DigiTimes reports that AMD 64-bit dual-core notebooks keep pricing edge

02 September 2006

AMD 64-bit utilities

There are some interesting utilities here including drivers for Cool'n'Quiet for 64-bit operating systems.
AMD Athlon™ 64/FX Processor Utilities and Updates

29 August 2006

Core 2 Duo launched for notebooks

EEtimes reports Intel ships dual-core, 64-bit CPU for notebooks

22 August 2006

XFS 64-bit article

Interesting article on the 64-bit XFS file system

18 August 2006

64-bit Mac news

Gizmondo reports possible 64-bit Macs in September

TechDigest Apple rumour of 64-bit CPUs in September

Inquirer reports 64-bit 'Leopard' OS knocks spots of Vista

Digit First looks at Leopard 64-bit support

MacWorld WWDC Apple releases 64-bit Xcode Tools

31 July 2006

64-bit News

Inquirer Core 2 Duo - Macro-Op fusion does not work in 64-bit mode

dtSearch announces 64-bit beta of dtSearch Engine

eXtremeDB-64 New 64-bit In-Memory Database For Linux

28 July 2006

MSDN Windows 64-bit webcasts

There are some very interesting Windows x64 webcasts at MSDN.

MSDN Webcasts

27 July 2006

Win64: Compiling ICU 3.4.1

I managed to build ICU version 3.4.1 on 64-bit Windows without too much trouble.
I used Visual Studio.NET 2005 and Windows XP Pro 64-bit and the command prompt :-)

Note: Remember to do a custom install of VS2005 otherwise you do not get the 64-bit compilers & tools installed.

To build ICU for Win64, just unzip the downloaded ICU source code.
Load each .sln (Solution File) into VS2005
You'll be prompted to upgrade it, so upgrade each one to VS2005 format.
Once it's upgraded, activate the Configuration Manager.
In the "Active solution platform:" select from the drop down menu.
In the "New Solution Platform" dialog, choose x64 from the list.
Then save & close the solution. Repeat for all .sln files.

To build it all previously you might have done it from the GUI or cmdline as :

devenv .\source\allinone\allinone.sln /build "Release" or
devenv .\source\allinone\allinone.sln /build "Release|Win32"

but now you can do this :
 devenv .\source\allinone\allinone.sln /build "Release|x64"

to build a 64-bit Windows version.

Links:

ICU downloads

26 July 2006

Debian AMD64

Debian to officially run on AMD64.
When Debian 4.0 comes out, AMD64 port will be official rather than unofficial. This is great news.

News story here : TechWorld news link

15 July 2006

Vista x64 install & SUSE 10.1 64-bit install

Vista x64

It took me over 1 hour to install Vista x64 beta 2 edition. First impressions are that it's very good. It seems slower than WinXP 32-bit, but it is a beta and I would guess that there is quite a bit of debugging code active.
The install process was fairly good & was uneventful. From fresh DVD boot to fully logged in it probably took 1.5 hours.
It installed a new boot loader that was compatible with WinXP 32-bit, so the new boot menu shows Windows and previous windows.
NOTE: It's very important to install Windows in the correct date order. If you have WinXP 32-bit, then install WinXP 64-bit afterwards, then Vista after that. If you install older products after newer products then you will find that they newer ones will no longer boot up.


SUSE 10.1 64-bit

The SUSE install was fairly good also. A few more questions were asked, but it chugged away and took under an hour to install in total.
It installed GRUB and now I can boot SUSE 64-bit, Vista 64-bit, WinXP 32-bit without issue.
Personally, I found that SUSE 10.1 is a far better release than 10.0, at least it is on my hardware.

14 July 2006

VMware delivers free server software

The amazing VMware virtualisation server software has been released for free.
It has greatly interested me because it's very stable, fast & fully supports 64-bit hosts & guests. Right now, I'm running it on WinXP 32-bit with WinXP 64-bit guest and GNU/Linux Debian 32-bit guest and GNU/Linux Debian 64-bit guest.

For this to work you do need a certain revision of CPU:

64-bit CPU support discussion
Use this tool to check if CPU is compatible link

Press release
Download

11 July 2006

More Win64 Apps found

Antivirus program NOD32 now has a Win64 version : eset

CutePDF offers a Win64 version.

Kaspersky Internet Security 6.0 supports (x64) Windows XP 64-bit.

Firefox 64-bit Windows builds
Vector64
Mozilla x64

Neowin Windows 64-bit application list
Software List

07 July 2006

Win64 programming tip

HANDLE

On Windows a HANDLE type is defined as a "void *".
For Win32 (32-bit) and int and long and void * are all 32-bit. This can mean that lots of C and C++ programmers have taken the HANDLE and placed it in a long or an int, or vice versa.

To modify the code, so that it is fully Win32 & Win64 compatible, you should really not interchange HANDLE and int or long. In the Windows 64-bit programming model (LLP) they decided that an int and long are both 32-bit, this is in contrast to the LP64 model used by all other operating systems which has int as 32-bit and long as 64-bit.
But under both LLP and LP64, pointers are 64-bit, so a void * will not fit into a (LP64 32-bit int) or (LLP 32-bit int/long). Beware of this, although the compiler warnings will help out a lot.
Use /Wp64 to enable 64-bit porting warnings when using Visual Studio .NET 2003 or 2005.

Advice on HANDLEs

MS 64-bit help for developers
Microsoft Windows 64-bit types

Microsoft 64-bit tools and tips

06 July 2006

Good Win64 blog

I just found this blog which has some good Windows 64-bit info. on it
x(perts)64

02 July 2006

WinXP 64-bit and Win2000 dual boot

Possible incompatibility (not fully verified)

I found that after installing Win2000 on my 64-bit AMD chip (long story about HP PC crashing and losing XP 32-bit), and then installing Windows XP 64-bit, everything seemed to work great. I was able to boot into Windows XP and set it all up.
But after rebooting and trying to start Windows 2000, it blue-screened with a "Stop 0x0000007B" error.

I did notice a lot of web pages describing that the installation order is important because each Windows OS installs itself and it's version of ntldr and ntdetect.com. I just didn't think that it would break Windows 2000.

Previously, I had WinXP 32-bit, then installed WinXP 64-bit, and both ran fine together.

I repaired my Windows 2000 partition by copying back the Win2000 ntdetect.com and ntldr.

28 June 2006

New ATI Win64 driver

Catalyst 6.6 - Windows XP Professional x64 Edition has been released.
ATI

03 June 2006

XGL 64-bit Linux

The XGL stuff works well on SuSE 10.1 64-bit.

Firstly, I installed the latest ATI drivers.
Then followed the instructions on this SuSE XGL webpage.

It was very slick and smooth and fun. I won't be using it long term though and have even gone back to the regular X driver for my ATI X700 card.
The problem for me, is that the ATI driver makes the card use it's fan all the time and it gets hot & noisy. Especially when you kick in XGL visual effects, like the spinning cube or fancy window movement.
I'm guessing that all OpenGL type interfaces will do the same thing and cause the card to need to switch on the fan. But it bugs me :-). I've seen it & it works well in 64-bit mode. But I've done back to the quiet driver.

26 May 2006

New ATI Win64 driver

Catalyst 6.5 Windows XP Professional x64 Edition has been released.
ATI

Win64 & Win32 EventLog

I did find that after a hang in Win32, I rebooted into XP 64-bit and then attempted to load EventViewer and load up the 32-bit event logs. Well, it complained about the file format being corrupt.
I've since tried it again today and it worked fine, maybe it was just a glitch.
I've now seen Win32 eventlogs from Win64 and seen Win64 eventlogs from within Win32 :-)

25 May 2006

New ATI Linux 64-bit drivers

ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Version 8.25.18 is released.
It now supports X.org v7.0 as well as earlier versions. SuSE 10.1 uses (v6.9.0)
ATI

12 May 2006

OpenSuSE 10.1 First look

I replaced my SuSE 10 64-bit with SuSE 10.1 64-bit yesterday evening.

Noise

The main problem that I had with SuSE 10 was that on my Athlon 64 HP a1130n machine, it always made a lot more noise than when running Windows. WinXP 32-bit & 64-bit were both almost entirely silent, except when really pushing the CPU. Using Linux it made a lot of fan noise just starting up X.
The noise was reduced by running the ATI binary driver. The PC was then far more responsive and far quieter.

Upgrade

Well that problem was been solved with SuSE 10.1. It all felt very slick.
The installation was smooth, much improved since 10.0.
What impressed me the most was the GNOME setup: the theme looks amazing, the layout polished & overall much faster. The Beagle search indexed my /home directory and seems very responsive in searching through thousands of files that I had installed.

I haven't need the ATI driver yet, I noticed that SuSE 10.1 uses X.org 6.9.0 which the binary driver does not yet support. But as of now, I don't need it. X feels so smooth and the PC so fast & silent that I don't need it yet.

I'm very happy with this upgrade, one of the best Linux based OS I've used.

SuSE 10.1

11 May 2006

Win64 applications

I now have my HP Athlon64 HP a1130n triple booting Win32, Win64 and SuSE 10 64-bit.
So far I haven't found that many Win64 bit applications.

For drivers I've found :
Motherboard drivers (ATI chipset)
Soundcard drivers (ALC 97)
Graphic card drivers (ATI Radeon)

For applications I've found & installed :
Process Explorer 64-bit (www.sysinternals.com)
Firefox Deer Park 64-bit alpha build
7-Zip x64 link

Seen on the Web :
X-Win64
Unreal 2004 64-bit
SiSoft Sandra for Win64

Good Win64 info. on the Web:
Extended64
AMD64