I had installed Debian 6 Squeeze on my laptop a couple of weeks ago. Coming from Ubuntu, I did this by downloading the hybrid i386 image and booting it off a USB drive. Now on GRUB, I'm presented with two kernels—a i486 one and a i686 one. Since the i686 one was at the top and as I didn't know anything about kernel architectures, I didn't care much and have been using it so far. But in the last few days I've been have nothing but trouble. The system crashes without warning, and sometimes shows a kernel panic.As a last attempt I tried using the i486 kernel and things have been going smoothly. My laptop's processor is a first generation Intel Core i3. What may have caused the problem? And why didn't I get two different kernels when I used to run Ubuntu?
i686 versus i486 kernel on an Intel Core i3
linux;debian;kernel;cpu