Today I made the step up or out to 64 bit Ubuntu. I downloaded Ubuntu 9.04 alternate-iso, Jaunty Jackalope and got it running as a virtual machine inside VMWare ESX. A couple of months ago I successfully virtualized Ubuntu 8.10 as a Linux terminal server and that machine has been serving DHCP and functioning as a great terminal server on our LAN. In times like these, every penny saved is very important. Thirty-two bit operating systems have a limit of 4 gigabytes of RAM and as the popularity of our Linux terminal server program has grown with our administration and faculty we are rapidly outgrowing the limits of our server. What to do? Some of my friends who have tried 64 bit operating sytems in the past had complained about their lack of support for Flash and media players. Though it's a bit to early to jump to any real strong conclusions I can say with certainty that Ubuntu 9.04, AMD64 supports those formats at least enough to warrant using it as a platform for our students.
I built the virtual machine with the recommended 512 mb RAM and once it was complete increased it to 8 gigabytes. It was great to login and then at the command line enter "free" and see 7.7 gigs of free RAM. I'll be writing more as I continue to experiment with this new environment, but for now I'm thrilled to be able to offer our students, staff and administrators a free operating system that supports or at least apparently supports thin clients. More to come..