On Fri, 2005-09-16 at 14:51 +1200, Nick Rout wrote:
> According to the release announcement the package cd's don't seem to
> have an athlon version any more. http://www.gentoo.org/news/20050808-annoncement-release-2005.1.xml
> (the choices seem to be alpha amd64 ppc (32 bit) ppc (64 bit) sparc64
> x86).

Only the base arches get distributed on the mirrors due to space
constraints.

> However on http://tracker.netdomination.org/ there are package cd's for
> a whole lot of other sub-arches -  i686, athlon-xp, P3, P4 and more. Are these official gentoo - if not can anyone tell me about their origin and reliability?

They were built by the Release Engineering team using the exact same
specifications as the rest of the media.  Currently, these are only
available from the Friends of Gentoo e.V. tracker.  We hope to have them
available from the store shortly.  Unfortunately, we just don't have the
resources on our community mirrors for hosting them.

> Also is "athlon-xp" compatible with "athlon"? Or should I go for i686?

No.  You need i686.  Athlon XP added SSE instructions to the Athlon.

> Actually using i686 could be a bonus as it would mean I could share
> binaries between my desktop and my p3 laptop, which is compiled for 686.

Sounds like a plan.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead/QA Manager
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux