Will Linux Lite work on non-PAE (old Pentium M) System?

[gold_finger]

In Mint release notes it states:

Booting with non-PAE CPUs

To boot Linux Mint 17.1 on CPU which do not officially support PAE (Pentium M processors for instance), please use the "Start Linux Mint with PAE forced" option from the boot menu.

Is that how you started the live Mint?  Or did you just start it normally?

Also, what exactly do you mean by Mint not really being "stable"?  Running from a live DVD or USB on an older system (that probably lacks a lot of RAM) can be very sluggish.  Once installed to the hard drive, performance is improved dramatically.

2)  The .iso file is 772MB but my cd/R capacity is only 727 mb.  Is there another way
to make the .iso then other than sending for one in the mail?

How did you try Mint?  That ISO file is 1.3GB.

Anyway, to answer question -- you'll need to boot from either a DVD, or a USB stick.  If your machine does not have a DVD player and it will not boot from a USB stick, you do have another option that will work.

• Download the ISO file for LL and use UNetBootin to make a live USB stick.  (For LL, as long as the USB is at least 1GB it will work.  For Mint, you'll need a 2GB or greater stick.)  Here are Windows instructions for using UNetbootin if you need them.
  
• Put the Plop Boot Manager on a CD.  (Check their site for documentation on how to do that.  Also, do a search on Youtube for videos showing how to do that.)
  
• When done making both the live USB (with LL on it) and the live CD (with Plop on it), restart computer with both of them attached.  You may need to access your Bios boot settings to tell computer to boot from CD if it doesn't do that automatically on startup.
  
• Computer should boot from the CD with Plop on it and you'll see the Plop Menu.
  
• Pick "Plop Boot Manager" from menu.
  
• Next screen will show boot choices and the USB stick will be one of them.  Use cursor keys to navigate to USB choice and hit ENTER.
  
• USB should now boot up.
  

If you used the "force pae" option when you tested out Mint and performance was bad, chances are that performance won't be any better in LL -- so don't get your hopes up too high.


I'm not sure if forcing pae works in LL same as in Mint or not, but you can try and see.  Boot the USB, then when the boot menu comes up and "Default" is highlighted, hit the TAB key to edit the boot options.  Then backspace twice and type forcepae followed by one space.  Hit ENTER key when done and wait.  It will take a few seconds or more of waiting, then it will begin to boot LL.  Test everything out and if all seems good go ahead with the installation.


If you got as far as installing, you'll need to do something similar to boot into the installed LL.  We'll get into that later if you do indeed install.


If LL and Mint just don't work well on the machine, then you'll need to try out a different distro that caters to older systems like yours.  I think AntiX might be one that works well on non-pae computers.