With reference to Etch installation, is there a boot parameter to specify the kernel to use, either 2.6 non-smp or 2.6 smp at the start of installation, without using the expert mode?

Usually, with the default installation mode, I end up with 2.6 non-smp kernel on my dual processor system.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks !

I don't know about boot options, but it is pretty easy to aptitude install linux-image-2.6-686-smp and just add the smp kernel to your grub menu after the fact.

Well, with FC3 I just installed it, and once it was up it had a SMP kernel available to boot in GRUB. But I guess that that depends on the FC3 installation program begin able to detect (correctly) if you have a SMP capable CPU. If your CPU is very new, it might be that this detection code does not pick that up, and thus does not install a SMP kernel when you install your distribution.

A remedy might be to simply compile an SMP capable kernel youself (it is as easy as getting th kernel source and configuring it to run as SMP - its one option in menuconfig, if I remember right).

On the other hand, if the installations on recent distributions does not pick up that you have a multicore CPU, there might be a problem as well running any form of SMP kernel on that machine, but that is highly unlikely (I hope!)

The easiest would probably be to just recompile your kernel so you have an SMP one available at boot, or even better, get a recent kernel source from kernel.org and compile that to be SMP.