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Re: [Torios-dev] ToriOS Release Schedule - edition 1.0

 

Hi George,

I think you need a non-pae operating system in order to run in a computer without pae capability. Otherwise it will not work at all.

Maybe that system could be a mini-system alongside a pae system or 64-bit system (and available via a grub menu or syslinux menu.

But there is also the issue with the CD size - it is hard to squeeze all we want to include into 700 Mibibytes, so it would not be popular to add a separate system (even if it is small).

I think a good solution is to have a very small system in a separate CD or USB drive, and boot the system into that system and try. A Tiny Core iso file is only around 15 MB, so very light-weight to download.

1. Boot Tiny Core
2. Open a terminal window
3. Run the command

grep pae /proc/cpuinfo

and look for a line containing 'pae'. If there is such a line (or lines), you have pae capability.

4. Run the command

grep model /proc/cpuinfo

and look for Pentium M or Celeron M. If there is such a CPU, most likely you have pae capability even if there is no pae flag. It means that you can use forcepae with distros based on Trusty (14.04 LTS) with a kernel of the 3.13 series and distros with newer kernels.

-o-

Pentium II, Pentium III and Pentium 4 all have pae (flag and capability). Also the contemporary Celeron processors and AMD processors have pae.

Examples of non-pae CPUs

Early Pentium M with 1.2 GHz clock frequency. The later Pentium M CPUs have PAE capability even if they lack a pae flag.

Old ViA-processors around 1GHz
Transmeta Crusoe
Pre Pentium II CPUs are too old and weak for ToriOS anyway

Best regards
Nio

Den 2016-03-16 kl. 14:43, skrev George DiceGeorge:
no,
i dont mean to include a non-pae working system in all distros,
just for an error message to pop up
saying what the CPU is
and which distro would work.
(i am not a hardware expert)

[george]

-----Original Message----- From: Nio Wiklund
Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2016 12:57 PM
To: George DiceGeorge ; toriOS Mailing list ; ToriOS developers
Subject: Re: [Torios] [Torios-dev] ToriOS Release Schedule - edition 1.0

Den 2016-03-16 kl. 13:48, skrev George DiceGeorge:
Is it possible for the install CD/USB stick
to first scan the computer
and post up a message if the CPU is unsuitable
with recommendation for what distro would work.

I wish Ubuntu etc would do this
for non-pae CPUs


[george]

someone wrote:
There are hardly any non-pae computers left. The boot option
forcepae in
Ubuntu 14.04 will provide a solution for Pentium M and Celeron M CPUs,
and in the very few (if any) remaining cases, we can offer ToriOS-Debian.

I suggest that ToriOS 2.0 will have an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, 'Trusty'
version instead of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (precise). I agree that there should
be a Debian Jessie version too.



Hi George,

I think this is difficult to scan the computer like you want unless you
provide the most primitive version (non-pae), and it is probably the
reason why it is not implemented already i Ubuntu.

Does this mean that you want to keep the non-pae live system in all
future versions of ToriOS? I think it is enough in one of the future
versions (Debian).

Best regards
Nio




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