What Linux distribution is best (in your opinion) to do the following?

RayJ03054 · 11-05-2016, 04:04 PM

I have an ancient laptop with a Pentium M (no pae support) that I would like to use to develop, test and run a Java EE project with a C program used in the background. What, in your opinion, would be the best distribution to run and why? I am familiar with Eclipse but any development environment is OK as long as I can develop on it with relative ease and find all the answers to my questions online.

I really don't want to start a religious war but I am interested in why you think your distribution fits my needs best.

Thanks!

ardvark71 · 11-07-2016, 02:42 AM

Hello and welcome to the forum

Not sure if I have an answer for you but to get a better understanding of the system we're working with here, what is the brand and model (and model number) of your laptop and how much memory does it have?

Regards...

BW-userx · 11-07-2016, 06:11 AM

seeings how they are all free, it is a free for all, install every one you want to find your answer to then do your home work, it is called, testing.

RayJ03054 · 11-07-2016, 07:43 AM

The laptop is an old (2002?) Toshiba satellite A55. It does run the Knoppix live CD but when I try to load RHEL or Centos (7.2 and 6.8) I get an error that says no pae support. My goal is to teach myself JAVA and provide a graphical front end to a program I wrote a few years ago. My next step is to try older releases but if someone has seen this problem before it could save me a lot of time and frustration.

Thanks!

BW-userx · 11-07-2016, 07:57 AM

look into kernels and do some research get an older release of linux/gnu might hinder current java sdk but I donno about that for sure.

look into Slackware as they keep older versions on hand

slackware ver 14.2

excerpt from here on slack 14.2 no pae

Quote:

The non-SMP kernel
is mostly intended for machines that can't run the SMP kernel, which
is anything older than a Pentium III, and some models of the Pentium M
that don't support PAE (although it seems that these might support PAE
but just lack the CPU flags to advertise it -- try booting with the
"forcepae" kernel option). On 32-bit, it is highly recommended to use
the SMP kernel if your machine is able to boot with it (even if you have
only a single core) because the optimization and memory handling
options should yield better performance.

kakistocrat · 11-07-2016, 07:59 AM

Lubuntu has a fairly light desktop environment and has options regarding PAE:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Lubuntu-fake-PAE

If it installs you can add whatever programs you need to complete your project.

DavidMcCann · 11-07-2016, 11:55 AM

I'd suggest AntiX. That will be fine if you have 192 MB or more of RAM and is OK on non-pae chips. It will also have all the software you need, as it uses the Debian stable repository.

As a matter of record (although you obviously know this), Pentium M usually has pae: only the models with 400MHz FSB lack it.

Timothy Miller · 11-07-2016, 12:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DavidMcCann

I'd suggest AntiX. That will be fine if you have 192 MB or more of RAM and is OK on non-pae chips. It will also have all the software you need, as it uses the Debian stable repository.

As a matter of record (although you obviously know this), Pentium M usually has pae: only the models with 400MHz FSB lack it.

Seconded. Antix is going to give you a nice out of the box experience while being very light on resources.

jefro · 11-08-2016, 02:59 PM

Try some of the i486 32 bit versions.

https://distrowatch.com/search.php?architecture=i486

fatmac · 11-09-2016, 03:40 AM

AntiX - use the Base version, then just add what you need.

http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page