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Old 11-05-2016, 04:04 PM   #1
RayJ03054
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What Linux distribution is best (in your opinion) to do the following?


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!
 
Old 11-07-2016, 02:42 AM   #2
ardvark71
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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...
 
Old 11-07-2016, 06:11 AM   #3
BW-userx
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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.
 
Old 11-07-2016, 07:43 AM   #4
RayJ03054
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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!
 
Old 11-07-2016, 07:57 AM   #5
BW-userx
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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.

Last edited by BW-userx; 11-07-2016 at 08:09 AM.
 
Old 11-07-2016, 07:59 AM   #6
Turbocapitalist
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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.
 
Old 11-07-2016, 11:55 AM   #7
DavidMcCann
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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.
 
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Old 11-07-2016, 12:31 PM   #8
Timothy Miller
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DavidMcCann View Post
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.
 
Old 11-08-2016, 02:59 PM   #9
jefro
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Try some of the i486 32 bit versions.

https://distrowatch.com/search.php?architecture=i486
 
Old 11-09-2016, 03:40 AM   #10
fatmac
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AntiX - use the Base version, then just add what you need.

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