I’m kicking myself in the ass for asking this question cause I usually like to think of myself as an informed person (and obviously in this case I am not).

My question is; how do I figure out what my system architecture is? Some people use i386 and there are more, but I don’t know anything about what I have. Along with finding out what I use, I want to know what difference it makes weather I use a program compiled for i386 or whatever I have.

Does anyone have a link that explains this, or maybe they could explain it themselves if they feel that they have time.

I can help a little- i386 is an old machine, from the early 90's. Then there came the i486- better, but still slow. Now we have the i686, most generally everyone has got an i686 now. I believe (please correct me if I'm wrong) that about all Pentium class processors are an i686 (including P-4's). There is some code that is for the i386 that is still used; like for open ssh. I don't think you will find anything for the i486 specifically.

Hope this helps you in the right direction,
Scott

I think only the P4 is an i686 and the P3 is an i586. If you run an i486 app on an i586 or better then it will still run but it wont be optimised for your architecture. The reverse probably wont run. It can be a bit of a pain in the arse to compile all your software from scratch so a lot of the precompiled stuff comes in i486 format to be compatible with just about everything. It is, however, not optimised. You should be able to find out your cpu with the command cat /proc/cpuinfo.

I know that the P-III is an i686 for sure (at least) because that is what I've got... Maybe I think the P-I (plain old pentium) is an i586. I don't know what they called the P-II, but they may also be an i586. I am pretty sure when I had a celeron (fcpga) processor it also called it an i686. I know when you are looking at the code either for an i386 or i686 one of the main things you are looking at is either 16- or 32- bit. 32- bit apps will not run on a 16- bit machine. Just like the problem with the design of the new 64- bit stuff; it looks like AMD has solved the problem with being able to run 32- bit stuff on a 64- bit processor

Scott

This is one of the questions I have also. I am running an AMD k7v with the via KT266. I went to download the NVidia Geforce2 MX/MX 400 driver for newly installed Mandrake10 (which is currently set on geforce2 DDR generic). It gets to the OS question and I am stumped. IA32, IA65, AMD64.....From what I have seen I don't think it's the AMD64 because those start out at over 2400 and my processor is 1700 (series) so should I be looking for the 32bit drivers? Really I have tried looking all over to find out this information and the only reason I went with Mandrake is because I clearly saw the description say "...supports...AMD and AMD64...." I would like to see what other Linux OS's are compatible with my system but figuring out this Architecture thing is making me feel like it's my first day on a computer. Thanks to anyone who can help me out with this info or point me to a method to find my own answer.

A Pentium II is also i686.

try the arch command

drakeuser: a k7 is a 32-bit processor. IA32 is the 32-bit drivers, IA64 is the 64bit drivers for intel cpus, and AMD64 should be self-explanatory . you should download the IA32 drivers.

ps: MS3F: are you sure? it doesnt occur to me that a p2 is i686 material...

EDIT: to drakeuser: its not really a matter of the distro, its a matter of your kernel version. you can run a 32-bit OS with a 64-bit cpu, but it wont take advantage of all the special features (pretty much any os can run on a 32-bit, so dont worry about that). to get those special features, the distro will either have to come with a 2.6 kernel built in, or you compile the 2.6 kernel yourself. mandrake 10 has 2.6.3 (i think), which should support 64-bit.