Dual Athlon setup

There are only two setups where I'd use a dual Athlon (and yes, I have one):

a) Heavy use desktop box
b) Heavy use server

If you're just serving some web pages, mail, ssh and the like, you'll probably do just fine with a single processor. Use dual for running a game server with multiple instances plus web, mail, ssh, etc. It's probably <b>not</b> worth it to spend the extra money.

If you did, however, everything would "just work" with Red Hat. It will install two kernels - 2.4.x and 2.4.x-smp. You'll select which one to boot with GRUB (and set the default as the SMP one) and you'll be good to go.

Dual processors are certainly fun for a fast desktop box or for a server that's going to be running a lot of processor intensive apps (like the one we're installing in Baltimore this week), but for the little stuff, you'll be fine with just one.