Shark Linux

I was just reading about shark linux over at www.distrowatch.com and it says that shark linux is an optimised distro for the AMD opteron 64bit platform. It also states that shark linux is a derivative of gentoo. I'm just wondering is gentoo a 64 bit capable OS. I love gentoo and wouldn't mind using it on my new dual system tomorrow.

Duck

you should PM Ploaf because he just installed Gentoo on his Opteron system I will point him to this thread. Have fun!!!

I'm limping along trying to get Gentoo right. I had little to no familiarity with Gentoo going into this installation. Most of my linux experience has been with the redhat and mandrake environments. This hasn't gone smooth but it is installing a step at a time and with much swearing and tweaking and they do have a amd64 version that is under development which is what I'm using.
I tried the fedora amd64, mandrake amd64 and the windows xp and 2k3 amd64 as well. Fedora and Mandrake both failed to install. I also tried whiteboxlinux and that just got on my nerves because it was as slow as fedora which makes sense given that they share the same roots. winxp and 2k3 amd64 both installed and both worked but with a bit of weirdness. Oddball, but not too serious, errors. an earlier winxp amd64 had quite a few problems though. drive recognition errors, etc.
Anyway. I just finished getting the video working right and kde seems smooth now so it's on to getting some working sound. This should be interesting. I still am limping through the gentoo installation but it's getting easier the more I do so hopefully this wont be as painful as the nvidia drivers.

edit-spell checkers just don't work right when you mispell a word with a properly spelled word with a different meaning

lol i've been there a few times. I use to install gentoo every 4 months or so since it first started just long enough to realize i couldn't get good 3d performance with my ATI card. So windows server 2k3 didn't work well on it? Did the interface look any different? I was thinking of dual booting win2k3 and gentoo

Overall it's 2k3 has been ok. The interface is much like the XP sans eye candy. The server tools are very nice since I'm used to doing that in linux. Not that taking care of a redhat server is hard but sometimes you just don't feel like digging through a config file trying to find out where the problem is. I like 2k3 but am still working on the Gentoo installation in my free time. Currently Dual booting, but win2k3 is getting very little play time. The video in Gentoo/KDE is working great now. Alsa is giving me some grief but I'm getting fewer errors now . I would prefer it to be a linux system anyway as I am going to need it to provide services and I'm more familiar with doing this in linux, and since Gentoo is the only 64bit linux install(excepting LFS - but I prefer having at least something of a package manager) that appears to be functioning on this system(k8t master2-far/2 240's) it looks like Gentoo is the way it will go. The shark linux that this thread started with looks like an interesting twist although they appear to be short on resources. It would be nice to use something like this that is dedicated to a platform specific OS without the distraction of supporting several other distros and they appear to be open in development.
Anyway. 2k3 is worth playing with, The recent XP64 release should be working nicely too. They opened up the beta program for XP64 yesterday http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/downloads/upgrade.asp but 2k3 is more fun because of the server goodies
I'd expect them both to perform about the same now. Problems I've seen were negligable although xwred1 reported a bsod on boot for win2k3 on his a64 system so it's clearly still beta with misc issues.

Only beef I have with gentoo is its so bleeding edge its sometimes unstable. Not always good in a production environment....

Should get a new dual opteron 242 server where I work soon with SUSE 9.0 enterprise edition pre-installed. Will have to get a feel for SUSE and get it integrated to our network, so I'll let you guys know how it works out. Should be fun.

Great post ploaf. I get my ram today and will start installing. The only thing I hate about doing a dual boot is that you have to do windows first because if you try and go back and do it later it blows out your linux install. The only beef I had was the ATI drivers and I haven't looked into that in a while so i'm going to go back now and see what they got. Keep me posted.
Duck