i386 it is
It seems that I’m now on my way toward getting Fedora 7 up and running on my old PC. Fedora 7 became publicly available last Thursday, and I decided to download the install DVD image via a torrent provided through the Fedora Project site. I ran into a bit of a snag because I don’t know anything about my processor, aside from the fact that it was made by Intel (it’s a Pentium III). So when presented with a few different Fedora 7 installers to choose from, I wasn’t sure which to go with, until I made this (rather simple) discovery regarding i386 on Wikipedia:
The range of processors compatible with the 80386 is often collectively termed x86 or the i386 architecture; today, Intel prefers the name IA-32 however.
Problem solved. I downloaded the distribution and burned the rescue CD. I’m going to have to burn the full install DVD at work tomorrow, since I don’t have access to a DVD burner at the moment. But I was able to successfully run the rescue CD on my computer, using a Smart Boot Manager floppy; maybe I did retain something from my toils a few months ago.
The new foreseeable stumbling block, once I have the install DVD, is the fact that I think my DVD drive isn’t working. My tower has a DVD-ROM drive and a CD burner, but I could only get the rescue CD to load in the CD burner, which doesn’t load DVDs. So maybe I’ll need to fiddle around with the DVD drive before proceeding with the install, but I’ll leave that until another day.
UPDATE: D’oh. The above discussion of processor architecture and which distribution to install was way too complicated. As it turns out, this question is answered in its entirety on the first page of the Fedora install guide. Who would have thought?