I have a AMD athlon 1.3ghz processor, and as far as downloads go, what kind of program should i get, an i386, i586 or i686? i also read somewhere that by typing hosttype at the prompt that it would show you what kind you have, but i couldnt get that to work. thanks!

What does `uname -p' return?

I'd look for that type first. If that doesn't seem to be available, you could always try the i386 binaries. They may not be the optimal choice but I believe that they should be compatible with your Athlon. If you wanted to get the i586 or i686 versions, you could check out AMD's web site and see what they claim your chip would be compatible with. (I have to believe that they'd be compatible with all of the Intel processor types. Otherwise they'd have a hard time selling many of them.)

Good luck,

Rick

you can download any one of them but i386 586 686 means that they compiled that program on a 586 machine so it uses the special commands that are for only i586 if you use it ona amd you cant the full performence but it will work fine under amd proc.

i386 = 386 or better
i586 = original pentium one or better
(athelons, k5s, k6s, winchips, cyrix 6x86 etc all fall under the 586 or better catagory.)

I *think* that some i686 code won't run on an athelon, but I'm not 100% sure of that.

The source code has to be written in a way that the compiler can take advantage of the extra instructions in higher processors so it's possible that binaries optimized for i686 could still run on even a 386 but not worth trying.