Anders Lundgren

It’s nice to see that new companies try to compete with AMD and Intel, or should one maybe just say AMD since Intel’s Pentium 4 doesn’t seem to reach any further. I’m rather puzzeled over Intel when it comes to the Pentium 4 or the private market. How it is possible that Intel didn’t get a working 64-bit processor available to the private market before AMD. It’s not just that, Intel also had to buy the technology from AMD. Hello?

Now we have P.A. Semi that have a new processor that will be available Q3 next year. The international media writes like it’s something exceptional… But haven’t we seen this before, not so many years ago? Yes, back then (I think it was year 2000?) it was Transmeta that should revolutionize the world. As I see it P.A. Semi is just a competitor to Transmeta, IBM and Intel on the market for embedded systems. The ordinary people may not see much of this processor, but let us keep hoping!

I have, for the past month or so, been running the Debian AMD64 port on my computer. Used the Netinst CD for the installation and it worked like a charm, the concerns started after the installation of the base system. The installation left me with the stable release which had a poor set of software so I upgraded to testing. Now I got some of the programs I was looking for but far from all. To get the office suit OpenOffice.org I have to go unstable - this at a time when noone wants to run it. So here I am, still running testing for some time. Have you successfully upgraded to Debian unstable for AMD64? Toss me a note!

I was recently reminded how good it is with a good regular backup. The only problem in my case was that the backup had not been taken care of. When my harddisk took it’s last breath the only backup was still left on that disk. So now I’ll have to say goodbye to my e-mail archive, address book and personal settings. Guess who’s going to make a real backup as of today?