hi everybody, i want to intall mandrake 10 but it says its only compatible with i586. In the first place what does i586. I have P4 3.2 HT. intel mother board.

I586 it is very peculiar way to say "Pentium" because pentium means “the fifth”. The fifth reflects the generation of CPU development, after i80186, i80286, i80386 and i80486. However there more cpu manufacturers (beside Intel) who support largely the same set of commands such as AMD and IBM and to avoid mentioning all of brand names belonging to each of them (itenium, pentium, celeron and so on), “i586” was introduced as a reference to all of them. To make long story short, your computer will fit nice, at least from CPU standpoint. Learn more at www.TechnoProfessor.com

Pentium I and K6-2 class AMD processors were i586. The AMD Athlon and P4 class processors show up as i686. Perhaps someone could define the point where a processor became an i686? In this poster's case, it isn't important. However, binaries compiled on i686 processors will crash when run on i586 class processors (instruction set incompatibility). Perhaps it has something to do with the multimedia (MX) support Intel began to incorporate into there chips somewhere between the Pentium P1 and P2?

Intel's Pentium Pro and Pentium II were the first i686s. All Athlons, Durons, and Celerons are at least i686.