Going with Fedora Core 6 the 64-bit way

About three weeks ago, my old desktop PC had a hardware crash and I was forced to buy a new one. I thought, if I buy one, then it should be something real good. The rest of the hardware doesn't matter, but the CPU is a 64-bit Pentium 4 Dual-Core at 3.0 GHz. Everything seemed fine, except when I started installing my favorite Linux distribution, Fedora Core. I picked the last x86_64 version, FC6.

My first three, maybe four, attempts were a total disaster. First it hanged during the installation, then I choosed XEN virtualization (don't ask me why) and it caused just errors, it even failed to shutdown and halt the system. After installing some more packages and trying to update the kernel the hole system crashed and I had to reinstall. This time without XEN.

The basic install without virtualization went smooth, I had no problems installing the NVIDIA drivers and some more packages, but when yum asked for a full update the errors kept comming and I couldn't get rid of all that package conflicts, even when I tried to force only x86_64 packages. Then after searching and reading two more days all the forums and mailing lists, I've found out that I can either try to install both x86_64 and ix86 packages, or to reinstall the complete operating system as ix86. This time I reinstalled Fedora Core for the n-th time, and updated carefully with packages for both arches. It looks like there is no other issue than the lost extra space.

You think that's all? No, it isn't! To finish everything and use my favorite multimedia features, the party just started. Lucky me, there is an unofficial Fedora Core 6 64-bit guide and I could find out how to install Flash player, Java Virtual Machine, and so on. More than that, I had to install 32-bit versions for video and sound players. If you're asking now why, like I did before, it's because some software is available only for the 32-bit platform. Adobe has not released a 64-bit version of their Flash player yet, same problem with codecs but at least Java Sun has a 64-bit version of their Java Runtime Environment (JRE). The 64-bit browser plugin is kind of buggy and I had to use the 32-bit version, but at least they are moving forward unlike Adobe who are moving backwards with old Macromedia applications (at least for Linux).

So far so good, but when I lauched the MP3 player and adjusted volume the whole sound crashed. A reboot saved me, reinstalled the sound drivers and sound card, this time a very high and constant sound could be heard each time I turned on music. After a few more hours of searching, I found out that most Linux distros have a problem with (ICH7 Family) audio controllers. The fix was to manually correct sound modules in the kernel. All the rest of my application seem to work just fine, except the system crashes from time to time and I need to reboot. Remember the old Windows blue screens?

My conclusion is that operating systems, Linux and Windows are not yet 100% ready for 64-bit platforms if you are using them at home with a bunch of multimedia applications. It's not only the operating system, most problems are caused either by buggy or unavailable 64-bit applications or drivers. I don't blame Linux or Fedora/Redhat, the same happens if you install a 64-bit version of Windows. So, if you have a 64-bit CPU I think it's better to install a 32-bit operating system (for now) and enjoy it, rather than going for the harder way with many extra packages and problems ... unless you like to fix and try workarounds for a lot of problems or missing features.

Don't get me wrong, I won't leave Linux :)