64 bit pain...

Hmm,

It's very difficult in the early days of 64 bit architecture to install non windows OS. Last week I got amd phenom X2 8 gigs of ram & 1 TB of hdd for around 17k. Was feeling nice to have installed fedora 14 live on it. Later on realised that the mblaze modem doesnt work on it ( i mean the dependencies were missing). So it took me 3 days to download Fedora 14 dvd which is 3.5 gigs of installation data. I am a big fan of the fedora flavour, ( it was very kind with me, most of my efforts were fruitful )

I sincerely tried different ways to install windows 7 64 bit on it, but some people are destined to fight when it's just a cakewalk for most of the others. So it threw a weird error, and that installation could not proceed. I wasted half a day on the installation only to see this error again & again.

Burnt the downloaded iso to a dvd & tried to upgrade the live OS. But it was a nightmare to upgrade it to a full f14 (laughlin). It did nothing at all. At least I couldnt see any difference. So i tried manual upgrade using the rpm -ivh command. Which obviously didnt help. So tried to reinstall it from scratch only to find the dvd had rendered unreadable thanks to frequent re-writing. Then got another dvd n burnt the iso on it. Installed laughlin using it. To add to my disappointment there wasnt much of a difference in the live cd & the dead (just kidding) the full dvd.

But i could install the mblaze wirelss modem on it & got the fun started.

It took almost 10 days to get the system up & running. The funniest part of it is, the computing difference is not at all noticeable between 64 bit & 32 bit. (Probably because i have been using fedora & not windows products.) Of course 24 hours of experience on a 64 bit machine is too little to be compared with 10 years on 32 bit machines.

The biggest challenge would be to install oracle product on a non microsoft platform & that to 64 bit. Because except for oracle database, nothing else really works well or is smooth to install.

right now i'm downloading the XE database to install soa suite on this machine.

Which needs a lot of memory & disc space.

Anyway I write these blogs so that when i revisit 'em It should remind me of what i was doing. I know no one reads them till the very end anyway........