advice sought for 64bit env.

I have a nice IBM server , 4 dual core xeons and 16 gig ram etc. I'd like to use as my emc machine among other things. I need to know what version of 64bit linux to start off with. I'm using 10.04lts now and it does everything I need but since I'm starting from scratch I wonder if going to mint 12 64bit would make it any harder to get emc compiled and installed?
Any pointers to add when compiling 64bit version of emc would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

Hi

I would agree with Andy, I gave up running 64bit Linux distros a couple of years ago.
Didn't find them any faster (very few programs are written to exploit the processor fully), tended to be less stable and a lot of useful programs are not ported to 64bit in latest versions (FlashPlayer is a frequent example).

wiki.linuxcnc.org/emcinfo.pl?Installing_...me_on_64_bit_systems
gives a little info but getting out of date

The magma realtime patches for x86_64 only go up to kernel 2.6.23 at present, so you won't be compiling any bleeding edge kernels unless you write your own patches.

Anyway, having 8 CPUs may actually turn out to be a latency minefield. You might have to disable 7 of them to get any decent figures!

What latency figures do you get with the 10.04 install?

regards

The server has a lot of tasks to do like feed thin clients, mysql, webserver, cctv, virtualbox so the 64bit is a must for the 16 gig ram cpu loads. I've been using an hp multi xeon workstation and under intensive loads it is a plus for sure. I'm trying to consolidate machines..
With what seems like a headache for emc 64bit it sounds better just to have a separate workstation for emc but can I still use the horsepower of the 64 bit server by running the remote shared computing power of 64 bit pycam to a 32 bit pycam workstation? Pycam seems to take hours on large files and if I use the servers cpus to help with the job it will undoubtedly speed things up.

Thanks for the advice I think you saved me a lot of sleepless nights and pots of coffee!