On Jan 14, 1:16 pm, thedeerhunter270 <thedeerhunter...@gmail.com>
wrote:

You make some interesting comments about running 64bit.

I downloaded 64bit Ubuntu earlier and gave it a spin - to be honest is
it a bit snappier than the 32bit version, but not that much.   having
said that, I didn't try anything processor heavy like multimedia.
I didn't try flash either as Ubuntu has a bug that means you have to
install manually.    Still it was nice to try it.  At the moment I
don't really see the benefit of 64bit.

I used to love SUSE (it used to be called, SuSE which I thought was
better somehow).  But I prefer my PC to be fully multimedia compatible
- I tend to always have a bit of a fight with SUSE and codecs.  I'm a
more a Debian man myself these days, seems the most stable of all the
distro's I've tried, and oddly enough easier to setup codecs.

I know what you mean about the large panoramas - I downloaded some of
Mars panorama images from NASA, these were 40Mb jpg's, I've only got
1Gb of ram here, and big files like that do tend to max me out.  Same
as Google earth, thats another application that likes a bit of ram.

I did some microprocessors stuff at college, mind you it was probably
8 bit design not 64.  Jeez it was so long ago now, I've pretty much
forgotten most of it.

About running RAID.   I have a mixed PATA and SATA system, not sure
how it would work out for me.

Just looked GRASS - not something I'd come across before, it look
interesting though.

To minimize the amount of tarballs you need to handle, the bigger the
distribution the better. Thus if you don't want Suse, then Debian is a
good choice. However, it didn't have the hardware raid capability out
of the box, which suse does.

GRASS is a bear to install. I only use it for line of sight analysis.
A lower resolution and less horsepower demanding program for such
analysis is SPLAT!

Nforce4, which of course is now 3 chipsets old, it can handle PATA and
SATA raid. However, I only used sata raid, so I can't vouch for how it
handles PATA.