Redhat9
 

Dear all,
I have got AMD athlon(64bit) based laptop. I want to know if all the versions available for a particular distribution(of linux) will work fine or not for my Nootbok.
Also i want to know what does the x383, x686, x86, etc.....mean to a user(naive)......
In a nutshell a want to ask how to judge whether a particular Linux distribution will work for my PC or not.....

I have Redhat9(x386) will it work on my notebook..



Thanks in advance....

Red Hat 9 is very old version and RH has now gone enterprise. You would not find RH free download now. If you want to use RH there is free distribution based on it called CentOS. You can download it from LQ as well.
i386 and i686 are architectures of the processor that you are using.
You have not put all your laptop hardware. But with that processor you can use either i386 or i686. If you have enough ram then you can choose any distribution to use that you can find on list at http://distrowatch.com.
For a newbie I would personally suggest Ubuntu or Fedora or Suse but not limited to these distributions.
A 32 bit kernel should work with 64 bit processor but a 64 bit kernel will not work with 32 bit processor.

If you have a sata HDD, then the answer is probably no.

x383, x686, x86
 

Dear all,
thank you for the reply.I still want to know what does the x383, x686, x86, etc.. mean???

Also, can any body tell me in which category will my laptop come??
(configuration of my laptop: AMD athlon(64), sata hard disk,1GB Ram DDR2,...))

x86 means the standard intel architecture. It will run on old 386 computers, as well as 486, 586 and so on... Some distributions today have a version for 586 or 686 computers, which take advantage of the new features found in the latest computers (and therefor run faster), but will not be compatible with old machines.

You have an AMD processor, which is equivalent to Intel, and you can go for 686 or 586 or x86. You also have a 64 bit architecture so the x86_64 will also work for you - but you should only take a 64 bit operating system if you have lots of RAM (more than 4G), which is not the case for your system so stick to the 32 bit system as they will actually run faster for you.