Actually the best is the one that suits your needs the most; but I’ve tried a few recently since I’ve moved mostly to a AMD64 set of systems and away from costly Intel Pentiums. I can buy two cheaper AMD AM2 motherboards, memory, and video cards for the price of one over-priced Intel model. Thanks AMD! But what I’ve found recently with doing Vista 64, XP 64, and a few different Linux derivatives is that by far Linux and specifically Ubuntu 7.10 is the best. The choices I see are to have a distribution which you can load 32bit stuff into a non-chrooted mixed environment or build out a chroot for a 32bit install. I’ve done both on Ubuntu Gutsy. I like the non chroot environment choice but recently I installed the Debian Lenny Pure64 testing image onto a box and was able to get the tools I want installed without having to do either for the most part. I am able to get Adobe Reader 8.1.1 working, flash plugin, realplayer 10, and java plugins working. The trick there was to use the ia32-libs* debian packages which actually do violate the directive of using mixes. But the result I think is a system which is very usable and supportable but with no 32bit land firefox installed. I’m able to watch streaming videos such as movie trailers now on apple.com and yahoo’s movie pages with no win32codecs installed, no mplayer32 or mplayer installed, etc. Yay!!
For the rare windows application I still need, I have vmware server 1.0.4 installed on my last Pentium 4 Celeron box; a little shuttle PC which works just fine. Do I notice a difference with the AMD64? Yes. The installs are harder for all the OSes unfortunately. But there is a “speedup” with them. Applications seem to snap right open on my monster AMD64 6000+ 4gb system. But getting Ubuntu installed on it was a bit of a patience tester.
My idea is give them all a run and see what you think. On the Windows side, its easier with a TechNet subscription since I can download and get Activation Keys for just about any OS that Microsoft sells. Very easy to load things into VMware except that the 1.0.4 version of the server will not do 64bit Windows OSes. As a side vent, I tried the 2.0 beta of server. Blech. I liked the vmware console monitor tool a lot. It installs easy and doesn’t require magic to use. Please VMware! Reconsider using a Tomcat configurator and monitor application and go back to a simple GTK thing. I cannot see using the 2.0.x releases of Server until they make a freely available monitor application which is not web based at all.
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