I know this will sound strange but here goes - I've been using Debian for about six weeks with some success but mostly not, very frustrating but I'm not complaining. It's a very complex and sophisticated new environment which provides many challenges even for those who have experience of other OSs.

I have an AMD 64 Athlon processor and used the kernel 2.6.8-11-AMD-K8 kernel image which I installed with the synaptic package manager (when I'd found it after a few weeks). However I tried to install packaged ATI x600 pro drivers from a site I found. I used the 64 bit ATI driver (for the AMD 64 bit processor as I thought) but the package failed to install with an error, stating I had a 32 bit i386 based system.

Can anyone explain this to me? I'm sure it is not difficult but I'm so new to it.

Many thanks for your help on this

Are you running the 32-bit x86 Debian or the 64-bit AMD64 Debian?
If the former, that is a 64-bit AMD64 kernel but it is running on a 32-bit version of Debian. Therefore some things may behave a bit strangely when attempting to detect what hardware arch you are running...

I recommend either

- Use a 32-bit kernel with 32-bit x86 version of Debian. E.g. the -k7 suffixed kernels should do fine with that processor

- Use the 64-bit AMD64 port of Debian. You may want to jump straight to testing or unstable since from what I've heard the kernel on the stable is a bit too old for it's own good regarding AMD64 systems - too poor support for many of the latest chipsets.

Thanks for your help on this, I kinda figured it would be an answer like that. As I'm so new to things I think I'll fall back to the K7 version as you suggested. Thanks for the links, especially the ATI driver howto.

All the best.