Since the release announcement in August I’ve been itching to get my hands on the new 64-bit version of my favourite operating system. Until now I’ve running a clunking old 32-bit OS that was getting kind of tired; the allure of 64-bit was really quite tempting.
Of course the initial challenge was making some space to install Slackware Linux on my hard drive. Windows XP Pro had been installed such that it took up the entire hard drive. Gparted to the rescue though! I went from an initial layout that had one huge Windows XP partition (with the usual Dell rescue partitions ‘cuz who bothers shipping CD’s these days!?) to hard drive that I could slice and dice any way I wanted.
The final layout left Windows in a primary partition but since Linux can boot from an extended partition I went with that for more flexibility. I didn’t allocate all the space to Slackware and I pushed the swap space to the end of the drive so I would room to either grow my Slackware install if necessary or setup another partition if I wanted to play with FreeBSD (perhaps in 18-years when my kids move out).
The installation went smooth as silk, and 64-bit really started to show as the installer flew through the packages. The only consideration is the 64-bit version (as opposed to the 32-bit version) only comes on DVD.
So far everything works great. I’m looking forward to replacing my HUGE kernel with a GENERIC one taylored to my system and perhaps even replacing XDM (if you’re not going to use KDE why bother with KDM) with SLiM and even trying out LXDE (I’m currently using Xfce).
What?! Did you think this was going to be another sycophantic Snowjob Leopard review?! Get over it fanboys – you’re all going to go blind pretty soon and then how are you going to get to the Apple store to pay for your next service pack!?
Cross-posted on Cameron-Schultz at The new OS is in the wild – SL 64-bit on the prowl!
