3/11    Which non-commercial Linux 64bit distro is most compatible with
        enterprise tools (in particular the Cadence/Synopsys tools?)
        \_ Probably CentOS b/c it is RHEL recompiled from SRPMS.
           \_ I didn't like CentOS 4.2 very much.  (64-bit).  It's possible
              it was misinstalled, but I found it lacking in polish.  It was
              hard to compile things for it, things wouldn't work...  --PM
              \_ Knowing some of the people behind CentOS and cAos, I'm
                 very nervous to build on them. I am pretty sure at least one
                 of their core people will not know what Cadence and Synopsys
                 are. You are probably best off asking the Cadence/Synopsys
                 communities about their Linux experience rather than Linux
                 users about their experience with these "enterprise tools".
                 BTW, if you hadn't clarified, those are not the tools I would
                 have assumed you were referring to. We also found a number
                 of other weird behaviors and possible file systems bugs in
                 64bit AssOS, but I think that's expected with their lacking
                 quality control and testing systems [e.g. file with diff
                 sizes having the same md5 hash] ... but that was at least 6mos
                 ago. Lately the bugs I am dealing with are in more obscure
                 areas like infiniband drivers, and it's possible nobody is
                 perfect there.
                 perfect there. Linux works ok for some of my integer crunching
                 projects which can be naively parellelized. My colleagues
                 doing more complicated MPI stuff see wierd, hard to reproduce
                 problems.
                 \_ They both recommend Redhat Enterprise.  I have run the
                    32bits variant with not much problem.  Not sure what it's
                    like in the 64b env.  RHEL 32b works fine.  Trying to
                    see if RHEL 64b exists and works fine.
                    \_ RHEL 4 + most recent update seems to work pretty
                       well on our dual opterons in 64b mode. Try it out.
        \_ Stupid question, but I'm not familiar with either of these--got
           a URL that actually describes what they do?  Looks like sort of a
           set of cost management tools (aka part of SAP)  -John
           \_ iirc, cadence and synopsis make circuit/chip design and
              verification tools.
              \_ Yes, very expensive tools. If you are using such expensive
                 tools then why not shell out for a commercial OS like RHEL?
                 To do otherwise seems penny wise and pound foolish.
                 \_ He might want to avoid the cost of the license if
                    he is running a very large (100+ system) cluster.
                    Personally I agree, just run RHEL. Another option
                    is to try Slowlaris x86, it runs fairly well on
                    x86_64 (opteron) systems.
                    \_ If he's running a large cluster then the cost of
                       the licenses is even less per node. It's silly to
                       spend, say, $100K on hardware and $100K on tools
                       and then worry over $2K/year for RHEL.
        \_ In my experience, the 64-bit RHEL 3/4 and it's CentOS derivative
           aren't as polished as the 32-bit versions. The package managers
           often get confused about 32/64-bit issues and throw weird
           unimformative errors. They're supposed to be 100% compatible
           with 32-bit software, yet some libraries come only as 64-bit
           objects and there is no rpm for 32-bit (but you can grab those
           manually from the 32-bit distribution). Of course, I am using
           Linux in a different environment, so my comment might not be
           very useful to you.
           \_ I agree w/ this. I've seen a lot of libc6 issues in 64bit
              mode on RHEL 4, but the same problems do not occur in 32bit
              RHEL. Another option for OP is to try SuSE's Enterprise
              Linux Server (SLES).