torios team mailing list archive

[Nio Wiklund <nio.wiklund@xxxxxxxxx>]

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