Hello, could someone please tell me what i686 is? lol... im trying to get a Radeon 9800 NP driver for RedHat 9 and i noticed all the drivers are i586 <confused> Thanks!

Don't worry about it. It's just a label. i586 and i686 in "most" cases are the same thing. The i686 might have a couple more options in terms of "extensions" it will support on the cpu - but in rare cases are they ever really that different.

What processor do you have (to make this simple )?

For more info, run a search on i586 on this site or on google.com/linux The skinny though:
i386 means that it follows "intel's" architecture, which includes AMD's cpu's
i486 is for the 486 processors
i586 is for celerons and P1 I believe
i686 is anything above that. The main thing to note is that they are backwards compatible. Meaning, if you have something better than P1, you can use things build for i386 and they will work; but not the other way around. If you have a 386, you cannot use anything about i386.

Cool

Cool, thanks guys! that makes sense... I have a P4.

Celerons pass for 686. Pretty sure 586 is pure plain Pentium.

Completely trivial note - just that I've got a Celeron and a Pentium, among others.