Ubuntu

what does i386 mean

Asked by Brian Williamson

i am using ubuntu 18.04 for about 6 months but the software updater has been telling me there are updates available and when i try and install it tells me there are no updates available. have been trying to download and install another program but am told there are no updates under the i386 architecture. Being a new linux transfer from windows I know nothing about the backroom stuff. Would like to go to 22.04 but this is stopping it happen. Is there a way around this?

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

i386 isn't specific to any OS. Ubuntu or otherwise. Its an architecture of CPU. Its a way to refer to 32bit CPUs that are very old. 64bit CPUs are marked as x86_64. The newest 32bit CPUs were i686 and had instructions that i386, i486 and i586 didn't have.

Wikipedia is your friend
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I386

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Brian Williamson (brianw20) said : 		#2

thanks for that, sort of makes it clearer, but does that mean I am limited to the 18.04 version due to the limitation of the machine, or can I hunt down a distro of i686

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Best actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#3

You will have i686 don't worry. Bionic comes in 64bit too but you have the 32bit version. You are only limited to 4Gb RAM per process. Bionic is also end of life (EOL) in April this year.

If your CPU is 64bit (likely) then I suggest you reinstall with a new install of 22.04 64bit. You can see your CPU with

cat /proc/cpuinfo

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Brian Williamson (brianw20) said : 		#4

Thanks actionparsnip, that solved my question.