[sf-lug] distro for an ageing laptop

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Sat, 2017-03-25 at 19:45 -0700, Alex Kleider wrote:
> This kernel requires the following features not present on the CPU:
> pae

I started reading this thread only a few minutes ago, from the
beginning, and I knew from the first message that further down the
thread I would see the above. I too need an answer to the question this
thread was started to ask, and I was already going to go find the answer
myself and spontaneously post it to this list, but as of
yesterday/today, I still hadn't gotten around to doing so. Perhaps
ill-advisedly, I had planned to start by kicking the tires of various
"light" distros in a VM first to narrow the field a bit before checking
to see whether they made non-PAE kernels available. This after I had
already determined that the *buntu repositories no longer contained such
a kernel binary as of at least 14.04 Trusty Tahr. I had gotten partway
down my list of distros to try, though, and came to the
frustrating-in-light-of-my-previous-statement determination that Lubuntu
beats the pants off LXLE and the others I tried in idle RAM usage and
other suitability for such machines. Reconciling all this was still on
the to-do list. I was expecting that some Debian derivative will win out
when I do.