The installer should check hardware arch fairly close to the beginning 
and tell you that a 586 is not supported.

See more below

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005, Miles O'Neal 
wrote:

> I know this is an old thread, but it hit me last night.
> 
> Troy Dawson said...
> |S.L. does not support the i586 kernel, and currently has no plans to.  This is
> |because RHEL does not support it.  We just don't have the manpower to deal
> |with any issues that might arise with a new kernel.
> |If Whitebox does it, then they could be a good choice.
> |If you want to stick with Scientific Linux, one thing you could do would be to
> |just run the old RedHat 9 kernel.  But then, that wouldn't give you a uniform
> |enviroment, so maybe that wouldn't be the best choice.
> 
> Dumb question.  The installer takes you all the way through
> the config stuff, right up to package determination (or
> selection, I forget which).  To do all this, we are *already
> running a kernel that supports my hardware*.  What am I missing
> here?
> 
> I understand that SL is essentially a rebuild of EL, and
> don't expect y'all to support a lot of unsupported stuff
> (though I won't mind if you do).  I'm just not getting why
> the kernel that seems to be available isn't available.
> Is the kernel used at install time not the same kernel
> that gets installed?

It is derived from the same source but is NOT the same kernel.

-connie sieh
> 
> Thanks,
> Miles
>