Today I received a sort of early Christmas present: a brand new Shuttle SN95G5 with an AMD64 3500+ processor! Since it has to replace my current production machine, I read lots of documents on whether all of my current software would run on it. I explicitly picked a graphics card (an NVidia FX5200) that provided support for the AMD64 platform, and checked whether my current distribution provided support for this “new” platform.

To be honest, the installation went very smoothly. The latest Debian installation images installed like a charm and my new system booted without a flaw. Using this how-to, the installation of the NVidia driver also was easy as pie. Currently, the machine boots just fine, and X11 is running smoothly...

However, there is a slightly annoying bug that I've found. It appears that the network driver is periodically spitting out an “error” message about not being able to “read the VPD keys”. According to Google, it has something to do with certain PROM data, but I've to look deeper into it.

I'll go back and play now...