Ubuntu 32 bit or 64 bit ?

Hi, I have a dual-boot system with ubuntu 32 bit (12.10) and windows 64 bit. My system is an amd fx 8150 and 16GB ram (and a gtx 560). Can I stay with ubuntu 32 bit or I should switch to 64 bit os?

There’s imho no plausible reason to be using 32-bit Linux on a 64-bit CPU.

With a 32-bit OS you’re basically wasting three quarters of your 16 GB of RAM. And no, PAE does not solve anything in that regard. PAE may allow system access to RAM greater than 4 GB (see a quote from Linus Torvalds here about how “well” that actually works), but processes (like Blender, e. g.) will still have 32-bit limits (3 GB/process, I think, on Linux). If you are handling large blend files (for example), this is still going to kill you on performance or may even cause Blender to crash.

So, if your CPU can handle it, by all means go 64-bit.

Ok, thank you shinji. Actually I tried to open some heavy file and blender crashed, but I supposed it could be an nvidia driver problem.

Hi, Blender crash if it run out of memory.
If you can open this file in Windows you know more.

Cheers, mib

I have no crash in windows. Anyway ubuntu is too difficult for me, I think to give up to dual boot , specially because there is no great improvement compared to cpu rendering speed in windows

Are you sure you installed the proprietary nvidia drivers? (From additional drivers)

To try to know what the problem is, try to open Blender from the terminal. Open the terminal and type:

blender

and press Enter.

Then you cause the fault in Blender, and when Blender crashed you read the final lines in the terminal looking for error messages.