Sun is mulling over buying Novell. Now that would give them control of SuSE which of course had the first AMD64 distribution available. So pairing SuSE with their Opteron servers would be a no brainer.

"With our balance sheet, we're considering all our options," Sun Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Schwartz said in an interview Sunday regarding the possibility of acquiring Novell. "What would owning the operating system on which IBM is dependent be worth? History would suggest we look to Microsoft for comparisons," he said.

And they gain a bit of an advantage on IBM.

AMD64 support for Debian is being put to vote.

With our current release time frame, AMD64 is likely to become the most sold architecture for personal computers way before the release that will follow sarge. If we don't release sarge with AMD64 support, our users will be very disappointed. The popularity of the debian-amd64 project just shows what they are waiting for.

Furthermore, the AMD64 architecture is mostly ready. It now builds just as many packages as our other release architectures, and it has a working installer.

The only valid reasons for not including it are lack of LSB compliance (which can still be easily achieved with a i386 chroot) and mirror space (which will be saved using partial mirroring). Another reason seems to be the lack of cooperation of some developers. This resolution intends to make everyone cooperate in this direction. Of course, the author of this resolution would welcome if the people responsible would just do it, thereby making this resolution superfluous.

Dragonfly BSD 1.0 has just been released. Their FAQ mentions AMD64 support in the works.

What architectures does DragonFly support?
DragonFly is currently targeted at the x86 line of processors; it should work on 386 and up, though a 386 is certainly not recommended. Work is also being done on support for the new 64-bit processors from AMD. There are currently no plans for support of other processor types.

However, support for Sparc or PowerPC or other systems is possible in the future. If you plan to submit code to the DragonFly project, please keep this in mind.

These guys are obviously pretty damn cool.

The Fedora Core 3 AMD64 Linux has been released. There are CD and DVD ISOs! You can grab the release notes here.

Mentor Graphics Announces Support For 64-Bit Linux Computing Platforms Based on AMD64 Processors

WILSONVILLE, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 12, 2004--Mentor Graphics Corporation (Nasdaq:MENT) today announced the immediate availability of Calibre(R), Mentor's extensive design-to-silicon platform and ModelSim(R), Mentor's industry-leading hardware description language (HDL) simulator for the AMD64 processor-based systems running 64-bit Linux. This availability comes at the conclusion of joint engineering evaluations with mutual customers. Customers stand to benefit significantly from the combination of high-performance software and cost-effective hardware targeted to meet the challenges of nanometer design.

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