Re: [LIH] 32-bit or 64-bit Linux on a 64-bit hardware

> I recently purchased a Compaq Presario V3700 (Core 2 Duo T8100, 4GB,
> 160GB, 14.3 inch, Camera, DVD RW). It came with 32-bit Vista Home
> Premium SP1 preloaded. I have installed OpenSuSE 11.1 on it, which
> of-course is 32-bit (that's the only DVD I had on my hands). I have
> following queries and it will be helpful if you all can share your
> experiences and views on these:

If you have the patience you could do a network install of your favorite distro - assuming whatever you choose to install supports that.

> (1.) What is the disadvantage if I run a 64-bit distro on this system.
> I want to be able to run firefox, flash, youtube all kinds of
> multimedia and other apps.

Life of a pure 64bit OS is pretty difficult out of the box - I am currently on a 64 bit Fedora + 64 bit Vista and there are enough issues to drive me insane. Unless ofcourse you are ready to compromise and run most of your applications in 32 bit.

> (2.) Since this CPU is VT enabled, I want to be able to run some VMs
> for testing, perhaps using KVM or Xen. Can I create a 64-bit VM on
> 32-bit OS.

You can run 32 bit applications on a 64 bit OS - not the other way round.

> (3.) What is the comparison of virtualisation tools in OpenSuSe,
> Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu

Is it not Xen in all of them - unless you are installing VMWare ????

> (4.) SuSE has loaded Grub on /dev/sda3 (which is extended partition)
> and make it active. So now if I want to get rid of Linux completely I
> can just use fdisk and switch the active partition to /dev/sda1 and
> Vista will start booting. Any idea if Fedora 10, Ubuntu or Debian can
> be made to do the similar thing. I think they all change the MBR so
> its not easy to remove grub just in case I want to remove that.

fdisk is not unique to SUSE - all of them have it. Do note fdisk is not removing linux it is just making your windows partition active - which still wont matter because grub is going to boot irrespective of what your partition says. You would have to overwrite your MBR with a Vista boot loader and ofcourse format your linux partition and return it back to windows - unless you dont care about that space or want to go back to Linux later.




- Mithun



      

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