why is fedora and RedHat still stuck at i386. pretty much all other distros have advanced. mandrake is at i586 and others like arch are up to i 686.
Anybody have any clue??

So that you can still run those binaries on a 486 or 386. Lots of old gateways, web servers, mail servers, and that kind of thing still run on 486s.

I've got kind of a old lap top. P3 700 with only 128 meg of ram. Min requirements from what I read are 192 and 256 suggested. Fedora runs like a champ on my laptop.

FX

yeah I see what you're saying, it just seems like they would have went up to i586 by now though.

You can always compile your own, optimized for your CPU, if you're really interested

My suspicion is that they keep it that way so you don't have to buy a whole new computer every time you get a new OS. Unlike some other OS vendors we could name...

A quote from the Fedora Core 1 Release Notes :

"Fedora Core 1 is optimized for Pentium PRO (and later) CPUs, but also supports Pentium-class CPUs. This approach has been taken because Pentium-class optimizations actually result in reduced performance for non-Pentium-class processors."

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/

any good resources out there that I could check in order to optimize it for my system?

A relatively easy way to get RPMs optimized for your architecture is to download the source RPMs for the packages you want to install/upgrade. Look for RPMs with 'src' in their name. Check out the RPM Howto for details; you can use the following command, assuming you have a working compiler and any required libraries installed:

rpm --rebuild --target athlon someprogram.src.rpm

(assuming you have an athlon; I think the option is '--arch i586' for a generic Pentium build). Also, read the rpm and rpmbuild manual pages for more info. Many programs that you can get the source code for also have a 'configure' option similar to this.

I usually do this with anything I install. I don't know how much difference it makes, though; the performance improvement might be negligible.