Some advice please - elderly laptop needs some TLC in the form of a suitable distro

[scrumpypaul]

Hi,

Absolute beginner here.

I have a Gericom Ego MS1003 laptop from around a century ago.

It did run XP. Not any more.

It had a bit of a hissy fit a few weeks ago and I ended up putting Lubuntu on it, which worked great for a few hours but then something popped - I think it was the hard drive.

Been on fleabay and bought a 6.5gb drive which seems to work okay but I'm struggling to put a lightweight distro on it.

Tried Lubuntu - it just sort of froze halfway through.

Tried Cr-OS - no go.

Tried Puppy Linux - came up with some sort of kernel error (pae?)

Currently trying to put Mint on it but it doesn't seem to be doing anything. In fact - no - it comes up with "This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU: pae - Unable to boot - please use a kernel appropriate for your CPU.

That might as well be Dutch to me.................. If someone could explain what it means and whether it is something that can be bypassed/fixed/ignored??

Going to try Crunchbang next.

Any suggestions please as to the best lightweight OS I can use?

The laptop will be used by my 12 year old daughter to surf and that's about it.


TIA,

Scrumpypaul

[Cheesemill]

Can you give us any specs of the machine like CPU, RAM, graphics etc.

Without them we are all just going to be guessing.

[scrumpypaul]

I couldn't tell you at the minute.

Crunchbang loads via the DVD so I will have a hack at that tomorrow - but if anyone can tell me how to enable pae that would be a big help I think....

[Cheesemill]

PAE isn't something you can enable. It's a feature that your CPU either has or doesn't.

A big +1 for #! if you can get it running though, it's my go to distro for old machines.

[theDaveTheRave]

Does the following look like it might be the same spec as your machine ?

http://download.gericom.com/NOTEBOOK...EET/MS1003.pdf

If so you may be able to run a copy of linux from a USB key (or put it on your new HDD and run that from the USB in the first instance)

Quick note:

I had a laptop die on me about a year ago, I pulled out the HDD, pluged it into another pc (via USB) and everything worked beautifully!
Make sure that you have definately got a 32 and not 64 Bit version.
If you can get linux on a USB to work, open a terminal, type the following

ls hw

and post the outupt back to here.

That is of course if you can't get crunchBang to work.

David

[mips]

Does the following look like it might be the same spec as your machine ?

http://download.gericom.com/NOTEBOOK...EET/MS1003.pdf

That's actually not that 'old'. With enough ram it will run XFCE just fine.

[aromo]

All modern distros require the processor to PAE (some kind of power management capability AFAIK).

My wife's Thinkpad R50 couldn't take Lubuntu 12.10 because of that so it is stuck with Lubuntu 12.04.

[Cheesemill]

All modern distros require the processor to PAE (some kind of power management capability AFAIK).

PAE (Physical Address Extension) is actually a feature that enables addressing of more than 4GB of RAM when running a 32-bit OS.

[sanderj]

That might as well be Dutch to me..................

... hey, I can help with Dutch! Dat is geen enkel probleem.

But seriously: how much RAM has it got? 1GB RAM could be OK for Ubuntu.

If RAM is 256 MB or even lower, IMHO any current Linux with a current webbrowser will be very slow.

[black veils]

the mini.iso from ubuntu will allow non-pae, here is a guide if you need it http://www.webupd8.org/2012/05/how-t...n-non-pae.html