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I'm looking at some files to download and some have in the filename i386, while others have i586,i686, maybe others. I downloaded Opera and it was an i386 file. I assume that these are indicators of a type of processor, and that I might have problems running a file such as MPlayer-1.0pre3-pm.1.i586.rpm. Is this assumption correct?
Basically it indicates the machine architecture that particular package is compiled for, its not backward compatible so if you have a 386 cpu(doubt there's many of them around though) only i386 package will work, but if you have a pentiumpro(i686) or above, all of them will work.
Generally speaking packages compiled for higher machine architecture provides better performance. Machine architectures for modern CPUs such athlon-xp or pentium4 can also be used, therefore you'll be able to get optimized performance if you compile your packages from the sources using proper cflags.
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