as the subject says, i have an amd X2 4200+ (also x86_64) cpu and my ubuntu image is an i386 kernel. i just want to know what kernel i hould get in synaptic pacage manager and also, will my old kernel stillbe an option on bootup. thanx a lot

You need a kernel with -smp in the name to have both cpu's detected and most likely you want -k8 in the name as well so it will be have the best support for the processors. Unless ubuntu does things differently than Debian you should get the choice of which kernel to boot at the Grub splash screen.

i got a k7 smp kernel

Good to hear you got it going. What is the speed difference between the single/dual kernels?

welll for the few hours i've been using it i definetely can notice a good improvemnt. everything loads faster, and there is not as much cpu usgae on the monitor. i still have to keep using it before i can note all the benefits

Good to know I have a dual opteron coming next week, thanks for the info.

i've been looking for a k8 smp kernel. so pass the magic if u get it

K7 may be the best you can get using a 32bit system. I know you can get the -k8 on a Debian amd64 system perhaps if your install is not too old you may want to move to the ubuntu 64 bit install.

What the others said is correct, however this is my setup. I have not made the plunge into AMD64-bit, so I am just running a kernel with -686 at the end. This detects my dual-core and runs everything just fine. My current kernel package (from Ubuntu) is 2.6.15-23-686, though the latest available is linux-image-2.6.15-25-686.

Another thing that is helpful, to see how your system is handling the dual-core, you can run the 'top' command from console, and then hit the '1' key. In Ubuntu, this shows me the loads on both my cores.

64bit ubuntu is buggy from what i heard. but you caught me in a transition phase. i am installing suse 10.1 tomorrow