Re: What Linux distribution to use?
On Tue 26 Jul 2016 at 21:17:40 (-0400), Stephen Powell wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 26, 2016, at 19:05, David Wright wrote:
> >
> > One issue though: I have a useful laptop that has a nifty 686 (AIUI)
> > Pentium M processor, but I have to run linux-image-3.16.0-4-586 on it
> > because it lacks the PAE. (It has SSE/SSE2.) Do you know whether
> > stretch will cater for non-PAE processors? Or is this no more than
> > a kernel issue which doesn't involve package builds, as appears to
> > be the case in jessie?
>
> You have a Banias-class Pentium M. All Pentium Ms support PAE. But
> due to a microcode bug, the Banias-class Pentium Ms do not report their
> PAE capability in the output of the CPUID instruction. A *-686-pae kernel
> will run just fine on a Banias-class Pentium M, but you must supply the
> "forcepae" kernel boot parameter to get it to work. I have such a machine
> myself, so I know from experience.
>
> Note that stretch supports both *-686 and *-686-pae kernels. You don't
> necessarily *need* to run a PAE kernel. Some prefer to run a non-PAE kernel
> because it's easier on the memory requirements. But the processor must
> support the Pentium Pro instruction set, which all Pentium Ms do.
Thanks for that clear answer; I shall try that out.
So I think that all my machines are in the clear. I guess there may be
some of the specialist tinier distributions that might cater for
machines even older than Pentium Pro that I assume Johann Klammer has.
I'm not sure discussions of Desktop Environments, TDE or otherwise,
would be relevant to such old machines.
Cheers,
David.
Reply to: