Which version of FreeBSD is the right one for me?

gkontos said:
No offense but it is 2010 :)
I never use i386 platform anymore, regardless of memory ;)

George
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agreed. Unless there is a proper upgrade process from i386 to amd64 it may make more sense to view it based on if the cpu is capable.
 
If you want to use the system as a desktop, with Flash or Wine or other 32-bit stuff, i386 is easier.
 
I suggest that even if you want to use as a desktop to use amd64. You will learn so much more about setting up separate compat environments.
 
wblock said:
If you want to use the system as a desktop, with Flash or Wine or other 32-bit stuff, i386 is easier.
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The normal flash linux plugin uses the same install procedure for both 32 and 64 bit versions. Wine I suppose is easier on amd64, although I don't have experience there either way.

I use amd64 whenever I'm dealing with a system that is at or around 4GB of RAM, or the system may be upgraded to that in the relatively near future.
No offense but it is 2010
I never use i386 platform anymore, regardless of memory
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Quite frankly blindly advocating for a 64-bit OS is bad advice. There are negatives to adopting a 64-bit platform, namely the increased memory usage of applications. The pro's and con's should be weighed, and amd64 generally only becomes an attractive solution when there is a problem i386 can't solve. Like addressing 4GB+ RAM.
 
Galactic_Dominator said:
Quite frankly blindly advocating for a 64-bit OS is bad advice. There are negatives to adopting a 64-bit platform, namely the increased memory usage of applications. The pro's and con's should be weighed, and amd64 generally only becomes an attractive solution when there is a problem i386 can't solve. Like addressing 4GB+ RAM.
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Maybe true to some extend. Like some VPS hosting solutions where ram is limited and your host is virtual. But in most bare metal I have seen better performance when using 64-bit. Even in 2G ram systems.

Regards,

George
 
There's a very simple reason for sticking to i386, not all ports support amd64 while all ports support i386. So for a "newbie" I would definitely recommend i386. It will give a new user the least amount of headaches.
 
If you are using ZFS filesystem I think amd64 is a better choice even if you have less memory than 3 GB. You might also want to upgrade with more memory in future.
 
Just wanted to add: you can run i386 on a system with 4G or more of RAM, it just won't (can't) use more than about 3.5G.
 
SirDice said:
There's a very simple reason for sticking to i386, not all ports support amd64 while all ports support i386. So for a "newbie" I would definitely recommend i386. It will give a new user the least amount of headaches.
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I would go the opposite way for a newbie. After all in a few years i386 will be considered legacy.
 
gkontos said:
I would go the opposite way for a newbie. After all in a few years i386 will be considered legacy.
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In a few years, what won't be considered legacy? :)

But again, it depends on what the machine is going to do. Server? amd64 should be fine. Desktop? Well, right now there are 278 i386-only ports, and using some commonly-desired stuff on amd64 is difficult, involving decidedly non-beginner things like 32-bit jails.
 
Go for amd64. My FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE amd64 desktop running Gnome 2.30, Firefox 3.6 uses about 300MB memory. I can't see any advantage of i386 unless you have some compatibility issues.
 
ahavatar said:
Go for amd64. My FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE amd64 desktop running Gnome 2.30, Firefox 3.6 uses about 300MB memory. I can't see any advantage of i386 unless you have some compatibility issues.
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I can say the opposite about amd64, if you have 3GB ram
 
Using amd64 with Intel processors?!
Duh!

I was thinking that amd64 sources were exclusively for AMD processors and not any other processors.

I have T8300


FreeBSD/amd64 runs in 64-bit multiuser mode, in both Uniprocessor and Multiprocessor mode.
FreeBSD/amd64 Project --> port to AMD's AMD64 and Intel® 64 architecture.
The AMD Opteronâ„¢, AMD Athlonâ„¢ 64, AMD Turionâ„¢ 64 and newer AMD Sempronâ„¢ processors use the AMD64 architecture.

The Intel vPro™, Intel Celeron D (some models since ``Prescott''), Intel Centrino® Duo, Intel Centrino® Pro, Intel Viiv™, Intel Core™2 Extreme, Intel Core™2 Quad, Intel Core™2 Duo, Intel Xeon (3000-sequence, 5000-sequence, and 7000-sequence) processors use the Intel®64 architecture.

I also have a 4 GB of RAM, so I guess I should download amd64 sources and fire up!
Right?
 
Seeker said:
I was thinking that amd64 sources were exclusively for AMD processors and not any other processors.
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It is for all 64-bit instruction set architectures, but the Itanium.

Seeker said:
I also have a 4 GB of RAM, so I guess I should download amd64 sources and fire up!Right?
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If you want to use these 4GB, yes.
 
I still get a little misty-eyed over the death of Alpha.

Beastie said:
It is for all 64-bit instruction set architectures, but the Itanium.
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Not to nit-pick, but you're leaving out all of the actual good 64-bit stuff. And FreeBSD even runs (or ran) on two of those architectures.
 
I've been using amd64 ever since I first tried FreeBSD (not so long ago, when 8.0-RELEASE was released). I had only one problem that was architecture-specific. I installed FreeBSD right after releasing 8.0 and there were no drivers for NVIDIA GPUs on amd64. But they appeared a few days later. Other than that, everything's great. No problem with Flash. The procedure to get it running is the same on i386. I definitely recommend amd64.
 
when I installed system 64 on my athlon 64 X2 3800+ gnome worked very slow. I dont know it's was problem metacity...

Now I used only i386 on my desktops
 
Yampress said:
when I installed system 64 on my athlon 64 X2 3800+ gnome worked very slow. I dont know it's was problem metacity...

Now I used only i386 on my desktops
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I sadly have to agree (in a limited sense at least). Pretty much everything under X feels (I know it's subjective, so sue me) faster under i386: opera, firefox, freeciv, openoffice. And this is comparing a 1gHz pentium-M with a 2gHz turion-x2. I still run amd64 when possible, though.
 
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