I am having the follwoing Hw Specifications

CPU Speed:3.2 GHz
Bus Speed:800 MHz
Bus/Core Ratio:16.0
L2 Cache Size: 1 MB
L2 Cache Speed: 3.2 GHz

with supporting features listed below

Enhanced Halt State (C1E)
Execute Disable Bit
Hyper-Threading Technology
Intel® EM64T

I have installed Suse SLED 10. when I give the command uname -m i was getting i686.


Now, what is the problem? is my Hardware is not 4 bit or my OS is not 64 bit enabled. If i had installed 32 bit OS? how to install 64 bit OS?

It will be great if some one would help me in this thanks in advance.

i686 is your machine architecture (compared to i386 which is more "general", i686 matches only somewhat newer machines), I don't know if it has anything to do with having 64- or 32-bit OS. When you install an operating system you (at least as of now) have to choose it from the beginning: you either get installation discs for 32-bit operating system OR for 64-bit operating system. You can't install 64-bit OS using install discs for 32-bit OS; as far as I know, no distribution of Linux (or other OS) release installation disc sets with installers for both 64- and 32-bit systems, because they would just consume too much space (many people download Linux discs from the web, so it's quite a bad idea to download two versions of an OS if you only install one).

I would just check out what the installation media (and setup) say; is it x86 (32-bit) or x86_64 (64-bit)? When you find out which, you know which it is -- you can't install 64-bit OS on a 32-bit system, and if you installed 32-bit system, it can't be 64-bit. Easy as that.

Thanks. I was installing from the Disk. Now i want to install a 64 bit OS in my machine. But before that, i want to know my processor type if it is 32 bit or 64 bit.

And my machine architecture shows it is i686 (but the specification of my processor says it is 64 bit. So which is true? I am confused.

If the OS is 32-bit then the processor will show up as i686 (all 32-bit x86 processors are i686, from the pentiumpro up to the P4/Athlon XP). If it's EM64T, then it's a 64-bit processor but a 32-bit kernel/distro doesn't know anything about 64-bit, so the processor runs in 32-bit mode.

Thanks. I got my problem resolved when i install 64 bit Distro OS.