I have a Toshiba laptop with an AMD64 processer. I have Vista Home loaded on it right now. I wish to run a CPU intensive program on it that does pure mathematical calcualtions and can, and has, run for over two days straight. I believe it will speed up somewhat with a 64 bit application.
My question is: Can I run 64 bit java under VISTA (a 32 bit OS) or do I have to, as I suspect, use a Linux flavor?
And if so, what Linux (downloadable) system should I use? I have managed to get openSUSE, Ubuntu, and Debian (both stable and testing) up and running on the little guy.
I appreciate any help you can give me on the subject. Thanks in advance.
You cannot run 64-bit Java on a 32-bit OS. 64-bit Java only runs on a 64-bit OS, but it doesn't necessarily have to be Linux or some other flavour of Unix. There's also Java for 64-bit Windows.
If you have 32-bit Windows Vista, then you cannot use 64-bit Java.
If you're looking for a Linux distribution: It doesn't really matter, because it's all Linux and all software made for Linux runs on (almost) all distributions. It's a matter of personal preference. I personally like Ubuntu; I'm running 64-bit Ubuntu 7.10 on my desktop PC and 32-bit Ubuntu 7.10 on my laptop. Have a look at http://distrowatch.com/ for more information on the differences between Linux distro's.