Hardware driver

  • Thread starter Thread starter Wolfgang Maron
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Wolfgang Maron

I intend to buy a Athlon 64 for use with WIN2000, Linux and Solaris 10. Any
difficulties with the hardware drivers for printers etc. ? Can I use the
drivers for 32bit?

Wolfgang
 
Wolfgang said:
I intend to buy a Athlon 64 for use with WIN2000, Linux and Solaris 10. Any
difficulties with the hardware drivers for printers etc. ? Can I use the
drivers for 32bit?

Wolfgang
Click to expand...
32 bit OSs, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 2003 Server, Solaris 10,
etc. run fine on an AMD64 processor and you use the 32 bit drivers with
those OSs. If you decide to go to a 64 bit OS, you will need the
appropriate 64 bit drivers for that OS.
 
I intend to buy a Athlon 64 for use with WIN2000, Linux and Solaris 10. Any
difficulties with the hardware drivers for printers etc. ? Can I use the
drivers for 32bit?

Wolfgang
Click to expand...

A lot of IFs.

If you're using a 32bit OS, it's the same as running it with a regular
32bit processor. No difference. The 64 bit aspect of the CPU never
comes into it.

If you're using a 64bit OS, that will vary depending on the OS. The
64bit version of WinXP is reported to have pretty crappy driver
support, and usually you can't use the 32bit driver.

If you're using Linux, *most* of the time, all that's needed is a
recompile of the Kernel and driver files using that distro's 64bit
compiler and libraries. Occasionally, recompiling under different
circumstances can highlight previously unknown bugs in the code, so
it's entirely possible that some hiccups might happen if someone used
some hard coded values that aren't appropriate under the new
conditions. That goes for recompiling for 64bit or using new library
versions.

Solaris? I'm not really sure how drivers are handled on that OS.
Never used that OS as an admin before.
 
I intend to buy a Athlon 64 for use with WIN2000, Linux and Solaris 10. Any
difficulties with the hardware drivers for printers etc. ? Can I use the
drivers for 32bit?
Click to expand...

I don't think there is a 64-bit Win2k (I have seen 64-bit 2003 mentioned).
Athlon 64 will run any 32-bit OS without any problems.

Besides XP Home, I run 64-bit XP Pro beta, and 64-bit SuSE 9.1 Linux, but
I have fairly mainstream hardware. The only 64-bit driver I don't have is
for my controllerless modem (I have adsl anyway). I print to an old HP
LaserJet 4L (supported by any current OS) on a print server that works for
either TCP (LPR) or ipp (URL:631) printing from Windows or Linux.
 
I intend to buy a Athlon 64 for use with WIN2000, Linux and Solaris 10. Any
difficulties with the hardware drivers for printers etc. ? Can I use the
drivers for 32bit?

Wolfgang
Click to expand...

I run a Dual opteron rig with Geforce 4 Ti4600 (need to get a 6800!),
built in AC97 sound card (as I'm lazy) and a mix of IDE and SATA. Linux
runs beautifully, especially with a newer kernel (2.4.25, or 2.6.8) in
both 32 and 64 bit modes.
I have tried out Solaris 9 and 10 with different amounts of success. If
you want a system to do Solaris, try to buy stuff on the solaris x86 HCL
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/. Solaris didn't understand SATA when I
last tried it out, so I had to use IDE.
 
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