Hardware check

[Noobie4Life]

Hello all!!
Try to be nice to me as this is only my second time in loading a linux system and I had some basic questions about my hardware and gentoo for compatablity sake.

I have an old AMD k6-2 450MHz machine that I am loadig gentoo on. I'm starting to second guess myself - that processor is under the x86 heading correct? Also it's been a long time since i set up this machine and I don't remember which motherboard I put in it. Do I need to check that and know what the onboad chip set is?

Also I have tried to load gentoo already and have found that the only way I can get the LiveCD to start running is to start with
boot: gentoo-nofb no-hlt

I picked up the no-hlt after about a half hour of sifting through sites and forums online that mentioned what the "checking hlt instruction" was talking about. However the emails/forums that I found that recomended the no-hlt also mentioned that it caused the user some headaches down the road. Is it ok to load gentoo under those constraints or is it going to bother the OS later when i'm loading my GUI?

Thanks for reading this and responding to a NOOB!
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So if time is the only real constant ... what happens to the poor time traveling penguins?

[ewan.paton]

my understanding is the k-2 isnt actually a i686 processor so you may need to install a stage 1 from within knoppix if there isnt a 586 livecd though personly i would spend a tenner on a p3 board from ebay.

gentoo is very cpu intensive and you could literaly take weeks to install on that rig, that said good luck and lspci should show you what hardware you have.
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