Yes, openSUSE and other rpm based distros were i586 based but Mint is not openSUSE! Fedora no longer supports i586 and I don't know about openSUSE.Coder wrote:can i686 work? can i586 work? YES---i used to have open suse i586 .can i386 work?
and of all of the distros that do work (any architecture) which is the BEST.
Mint is based on Ubuntu and needs i686 or better. Older Ubuntu distros had i486 but not anymore... Debian 6 has i486 support, you can run in a 486SX/DX or better.
Many distros say they are i386 but that does not mean they are Intel 80386 compatible, that means they run Intel ia32. Debian says it has a i386 version but it doesn't run in a 80386 unless you recompile the kernel with support for the 80386. Currently, no major linux distro runs out of the box in a 80386.
Some distros compile the kernel for i486 or i686 but compile all other packages with i386, that means that if you compile the kernel with support for 80386 everything else should work without the need to recompile every package.
The last Debian with binaries for 80386 was Debian 3.0 or Debian 3.1 with the 386 upgrade path.
I don't know how Ubuntu compiles the 32-bit packages (i386, i486, i586 or i686) but the kernel is i686. If you have a Pentium Classic/MMX with 1024MB of RAM you can't run a modern Ubuntu based Mint edition unless you compile your own i586 kernel. You can however run other linux distros with i486 or i586 support.
Are you sure you are using a Pentium Classic/MMX and not a Pentium II or III? That Pentium is a very slow CPU today so you should use a lighter and faster distro. My Pentium 200MHz MMX with 128MB of RAM was fast running old redhat, Mandrake and SuSE distros but that was a long time ago.
