Ubuntu Linux ia64 and HP-UX Itanium HP ZX6000 Workstations.

[Jesse Dougherty]

We have a customer that wants to run some memory intensive CAD applications on HP-UX v2 and Linux. We set up a HP Itanium ZX6000 workstation with 2 CPUs & 24GB memory with a dual boot Linux and HP-UX drives. It seem to be working nicely with Ubuntu and v2 loaded.

My question is, is there a another free version of Linux that runs better than Ubuntu on these workstations. Ubuntu is nice but there is no support for the HP Itanum ia64 on the more current release Ubuntu levels. CentOS runs nice also but its not as user friendly.

If anyone know if one, let me know.

Thanks
Jesse
Cypress Technology Inc
re-sellers of HP products

[Steven Schweda]

I have a Debian installed on my rx2600, but
I can't say that it'd be better than anything
else for anything in particular.

> [...] but its not as user friendly.

Which means what, exactly?

[rick jones]

Unless your customer is doing things to cause much time to be spent in the kernel, for "memory intensive CAD applications" I would think that the memory subsystem (number of DIMMs) and the compiler used to generate the CAD binaries would be the most important things.

Can we assume that for the HP-UX version the HP compilers are being used? For the Linux version, I'd expect (guessing) the best results would be from the Intel compilers.

[Alan_152]

I'd suspect that CentOS, Fedora, and OpenSuse will run great on these things, as their paid couterparts (Red Hat and Suse) are supported by HP.

[TwoProc]

I think your "other" choice is/was CentOS which you've covered already. And no, RH variants aren't as "cool" as Ubuntu, but can be worked around. For a difference, try the KDE desktop instead of Gnome for CentOS, your users may like it better. In the end though, it's why I run workstations and servers with RedHat, and smaller things (laptops, small desktop systems, netbooks) on Ubuntu variants.

Last note I read on Ubuntu forums is that they are considering letting 64 bit go on regular Intel chips as well, as they seem to have trouble getting coders and tester volunteers for the builds, and figure that PAE 32 bit mode gets you most of the way there anyways.

[Z37A]

Suse is free, only pay if you need to update. And support IA64. Are supported from HP.

http://www.novell.com/promo/suse/sle11sp1.html?nov_gaevent=Homepage|Banner|SLES_SP1