On Tue, 30 Sep 2008, Florin Iucha wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 07:51:44PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote:
>
>> Which Linux distros are true 64-bit OSs?  If I buy a PC with a couple 
>> of X5460 chips...
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon#5400-series_.22Harpertown.22
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_microprocessors#.22Harpertown.22_.28standard-voltage.2C_45_nm.29
>>
>> ...which Linux distros will have 64-bit packages ready to run on that 
>> architecture making full use of the available memory (e.g., 16 GB RAM)?
>
> All the major Linux distributions have 64-bit kernel/binaries:
>
>   Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Centos


I guess Ubuntu runs on all sorts of 64-bit Intel chips and chipsets, so 
that won't be a problem.  But are the packages also compiled for the 
64-bit architecture?  For most packages it probably won't matter much. 
Maybe this is the right answer:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=785743

I'll also have to make sure that Oracle will run on that system before I 
buy it (I think I mentioned before that I'm stuck in Oracle world for now 
but may go to PostgreSQL someday).

Thanks, Florin.

Mike