Good morning!!! Yesterday, i was surfing in the ftp server of the suse...
Inside i have found two directories one with i586 name and an other one with i686 name... I was wondering what they stand for?
A!! and the i386 name?
Thx a lot have a nice day

i386 means that the binaries are optimized for the lowest common denominator, the 386. i586 and i686 means that they are optimized for the corresponding processors.

theres lower then i386, but anything lower cant multitask, so only dos will work for those ...

Pentium starts at i586 .. i686 i think is Pentium 2

when programs are compiled they are turned into machine code which can only work for a certain processor (cause of its new or "special" features) , the i** line of processors is all compatible from the bottom up, so if a program was compiled for i386 , it will work on all processors that came after it, but if it was compiled for a Pentium * it cant work on a i386 because it has instructions which didn't exist on that processor

normally things are compiled for i586 (or i686) by the distributes because almost no one has lower then that these days

This is one of those things I have always wondered about, but have been too afraid to ask.
Thanks for the info.

The quicker you ask a question the quicker you understand the answer

nice theory