Thursday 26 February 2009

Debian 5.0 on Itanium IA64


Debian 5.0 was released on February 14th, 2009. I believe it represents the state-of-the-art linux distribution that supports machines based around the Itanium processor family. Other distros including SuSE, Red Hat and Fedora are at least one major release behind with an IA64 based port.

I installed Debian 5.0 on my HP ZX6000 workstation which has two 1.3 GHz Madison-class Itanium 2 processors, an Ultra SCSI 320 storage backbone and 16GB of RAM. The installation was via a DVD image downloaded by Bittorrent (took about 7 hours to download the complete image). The installation was painless, and even initially could be driven via a serial terminal connected to the console port.

I have tested the distribution for two days and so far it has been flawless. It works out-of-the-box with both an ATI 7500 PCI video card and the originally supplied ATI Fire GL AGP graphics card.

Well done DEBIAN! Please keep up the good work...

msw@zx6000:~$ uname -a
Linux zx6000 2.6.26-1-mckinley #1 SMP Sat Jan 10 19:19:15 UTC 2009 ia64 GNU/Linux

2 comments:

Project said...

Very nice, I've got debian testing installed on my rx2600 with the AGP backplane and management card installed. Works really well, nice solid computer and with 10GB ram that I have quite nice :D

Anonymous said...

Ditto here. I have Debian Squeeze (testing) installed on my rx2600 with the management card as well. Works well, good IO bandwidth.