As my followers may know I have been doing my Web Development on WAMP (Windows, Apache Server, MySQL, Php [Perl, Python,etc]). To my dismay, I noticed that running Apache2 Web Server as a Windows Service, seemed to slow everything else down and since I also like to do a lot of video editing and other multimedia projects, this apparent slow down was not acceptable. (Lamp, of course is the same thing just substitute Linux for Windows)

So I recently moved everything I had on one of my hard drives and installed Linux with grub (GRand Unified Bootloader) so that I could still boot to my Windows XP 32bit Operating System when I wanted to. I tried several Linux distributions and both major Desktop Managers (KDE and Gnome) before settling on Debian 5.0.3 (lenny-stable) amd64. For the curious, I have a Intel dual-core mutli-threading Extreme Edition CPU 3.2Ghz with matching Intel mother-board/chip set. The Linux Distro’ described above is named amd64, (I have been told) to acknowledge that AMD was the first to come out with dual core 64bit chips, but that Linux (Debian) distribution is the one for AMD64 chip sets or Intel EMT-64 chips.

The first question some people have is if you had a 64bit capable chip set why didn’t you switch to the 64bit version of XP? Simple, money! And when I first built my computer, the 64bit chips were new and 64bit software was not abundant (my computer looks like an octopus with every device I have connected to it so… think 64bit drivers!).