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I was looking for a Mandriva torrent, and I found this one. However it says i586 in it's title and I have a AMD Athlon 64, so I was wondering if I should download it or not. I don't know the exact difference between i386, i586 and a bunch more, so maybe someone can explain it to me and tell me what types are compatible with my processor?
You want x86-64. The i586 will work if you can't find any other distrubutions that are more specific.
Yep, go with the x86_64/amd64 versions.
Some distros use a multilib setup (both 32bit and 64bit libraries) because there are programs that haven't been cleaned up for 64-bit processors (OpenOffice.org being the usual example). Also, the flash player and some other plugins won't work.
I know SuSE uses multilib, so you can use those, but Debian don't (at least that I've seen), so OOo is out of the question.