Larry Phillips wrote:
> Sounds good. I went to the Ditribution page at fedora.redhat, and
> found a couple of Canadian distributors. Right now I am trying to
> figure out which distribution I need. I see 1386, x86, x86_64, and
> i686 all spoken of, and the vendors I have found so far seem to only
> carry i386 and x86_64. Will the i386 distribution do for a 486 or
> Pentium machine?
Firstly, no Fedora release works on a 486.
Secondly, these days i386 and x86 are effectively the same thing -- the
32 bit architecture introduced with the Intel 386. i686 includes all the
(few) extra instructions added by the Pentium Pro -- so that also
includes Pentium II, AMD Athlon (or later) or recent VIA processors.
Fedora i386 includes support for i586 processors if you happen to have
an older PC. There isn't a separate i686 release -- Fedora i386 also
supports these processors.
x86_64 = x86-64 = AMD64 = EMT64 = "IA32e" = "x64" is the new 64 bit
extensions that AMD introduced with the Opteron and Athlon 64. Later
Pentium 4 processors also have support for it, as do some Semprons, some
Celerons and (I understand) all Intel Core 2 processors.
None of these processors *require* a 64 bit OS. They can all run
perfectly happily in 32 bit mode with a 32 bit OS. So you can get an
i386 = x86 distribution for these computers, too, at the expense of a
bit of speed (but certain non-Fedora Web plugins and multimedia codecs
work more easily on a 32 bit OS).
IA64 is something else again.
Hope this helps,
James.
--
E-mail: james@ | It was amazing how human traits and affairs could so
aprilcottage.co.uk | reliably and continuously be guided by a succession of
| big white balls of plasma billions of miles away, most of
| whom have never even heard of humanity.
| -- "The Last Continent", Terry Pratchett
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