Ubuntu - SMP ready ??

Soldato
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I just downlaoed the AMD64 6.06 Dapper Drake

I see in the installation instructions it says the kernel isn't compiled for SMP, and points me to the instructions for compiling my own kernel.

I don't want to do this - can someone advise of a freely downloadable distribution that "out of the box" has an SMP compiled kernel ? I could be wrong, but from past experience, I have a feeling SuSe lets you choose the SMP kernel option during the install process ?

Any suggestions appreciated. This is for my quad Opteron (well, two dual core so 2+2=4 sort of)

Thanks
 
Soldato
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Excellent. One more question - will the grub boot loader (or whatever it uses) be able to boot the existing Windows X64 ? I know in the past it successfully boots 32 bit XP but this will be the first time I've tried a dual boot with Windows Pro X64
 
Man of Honour
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I don't suppose it would be any different and I've never heard anybody mention that it they had problems because it was Win 64.

Even if all else fails you can boot to windows recovery and fix the MBR to flush away all remnants of your Grub bootloader if you decide to nuke the Linux installation.
 
Soldato
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BillytheImpaler said:
I don't suppose it would be any different and I've never heard anybody mention that it they had problems because it was Win 64.

Even if all else fails you can boot to windows recovery and fix the MBR to flush away all remnants of your Grub bootloader if you decide to nuke the Linux installation.

Thanks - yes I've blown away the bootloader that way in the past :)
 
Soldato
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Well, I installed Ubuntu a year or so ago and all was fine. This time, all it does following install is boot to a command prompt, no GUI !! It says it is the AMD64 server distro, so pwrhaps I got the wrong one
 
Soldato
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I chose this one:

64-bit PC (AMD64) server install CD

Not this one

64-bit PC (AMD64) desktop CD

I thought that was a LIVECD only, but it appears that it functions as both a LiveCD and an install CD and I mis-read it. Oh well.... Guess I'll start all over again :)
 
Soldato
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BillytheImpaler said:
Why start over? Wouldn't it be easier to use apt to get the packages you need for the GUI?

Yes, if I knew how. The install is incredibly quick, so it is easiest for me. And maybe the server install misses a lot of other things too. Better to be sure to get it right
 
Soldato
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I now have the desktop version installed. :)

With the server install, I was easily able to manually create my partitioning scheme. I totally failed to be able to do that with the graphical partioning tool in the desktop install, so just had to point it to the free space and let it decide.

Now I'm trying to get the SMP kernel from the synaptic package manager. I think I got the right one, it said SMP in the synaptic package manager but on the grub menu it makes no mention of SMP in the kernel name. Still, the graphical system monitor shows CPU1, CPU2, CPU3 and CPU4 so I guess I got it right
 
Soldato
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Thanks - the one I now choose from the grub menu says
2.6.15-26-amd64-k8

uname -a shows
2.6.15-26-amd64-k8 SMP PREEMPT... x86_64

Looks like I'm in business !
 
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