On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 5:02 AM, Martin Jungowski martin@rhm.de wrote:
On Sun, 12 Dec 2010 17:08:24 -0500 Peter A wrote:
Over the past few years, i386 has become a synonym for 32bit rather than "it will run on a 80386". The RPM package for the kernel is correctly labeled as i686, its just the name of the distro that remained i386.
That's why I'm asking whether or not it would make more sense to rename the distro to i686 instead. It might make perfect sense in a very colloquial way but from a technical point of view i386 suggests 32-bit 80386 compatibility. Either way, it's just a suggestion and general wondering since I wasn't aware of what i386 had become in the US.
It actually makes more sense to call the distro x86, better to peg it to a particular architecture then a CPU release.
Then one has x86 (32-bit) and x86_64 (64-bit).
But this is all decided by Redhat, CentOS is just a RHEL recompilation with the intellectual property stripped out.
-Ross