i386 & i586

[Reinhold Rumberger]

Am Montag 30 November 2009 schrieb Ken:
> I am absolutely new to Linux & have just received my 4 DVD's
>  (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mandriva & OpenSuse)

That's something you'll have to find out for yourself. If you have 
the necessary free space, you can install all of them in parallel 
(actually, for Ubuntu vs. Kubuntu, you can just install either and 
make sure that you install both the ubuntu-desktop and kubuntu-
desktop packages).
If your DVDs contain a live system (the Ubuntu and Kubuntu ones 
probably do), you can just try them out to see which one you're more 
comfortable with.

> As a newbee which one should I start with and what is the diff
>  between i386 & i586??

See Wikipedia.
Modern x86 CPUs have a larger instruction set than the original 386. 
Therefore applications & libraries that use these new instructions 
may experience a boost in speed.
In other words, a Linux distribution for i586 may seem a little 
snappier that one for i386, given the same hard- and software.

On modern systems (64 bit and lots of RAM), I don't think this will 
make much of a difference.

  --Reinhold