Quote:
Has anyone got any experience with the Debian AMD-64 project? Basically I'm wondering if it's worth trying to install, or just stick with 32 bit for now.


Can't comment on Debian, but I'm using Fedora Core 2 x86_64. Before that,
I used Fedora Core 2 i386 on the same hardware. I had to do a full install,
because there's no upgrade path from i386 to x86_64.

The biggest drawbacks I am experiencing is the lack of a Mozilla plugin
for Sun Java and the lack of a 64-bit Flash plugin. It's amazing how many
websites are totally useless if you don't support Flash.

Everything open source works fine. Oggenc is spectacularly faster
when compiled for x86_64.

Quote:
Will a 64 bit kernel work with a 32 bit distribution?


I would assume you need at least some tools that are 64-bit aware.
You can compile a 32-bit kernel that is optimised for the Athlon 64,
though. And you can run 32-bit code on a 64-bit distribution, provided
you have all the needed 32-bit libraries as well. In fact, OpenOffice is
distributed as a 32-bit application in 64-bit distibutions.

Pim