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I have some old Asus 1001PX which is 32-bit and has no UEFI just lying around there. It originally used to run Windows 7 starter and I switched it to a VERY old version of Linux Mint (probably version 11) which I found somewhere. I was looking for whether there is a "modern" distro that can work on it, but despite ones like Alpine or Bodhi who have images for the x86 system exist they work only for UEFI systems. If I made a bootable disk out of one of them the BIOS won't detect it on my machine.
Does anyone know some newer distro to work with this? I know there's Gentoo which has compatibility with pretty much any hardware, but I just want some "just worksy" one.
Debian and Slackware both released 32-bit installers with their latest releases (Debian 12 and Slackware 15) and will support BIOS installs. Depending on your available memory you will probably want to install a lighter-weight desktop, like LXDE or LXQT.
Edit to add: Debian 32-bit only supports i686 CPUs with Bookworm, if that is an issue you can try the previous stable release, which is still fairly "modern".
Debian and Slackware both released 32-bit installers with their latest releases (Debian 12 and Slackware 15) and will support BIOS installs. Depending on your available memory you will probably want to install a lighter-weight desktop, like LXDE or LXQT.
Edit to add: Debian 32-bit only supports i686 CPUs with Bookworm, if that is an issue you can try the previous stable release, which is still fairly "modern".
FYI: the 686 version will run on all modern processors including the latest 64-bit processors. IT just fails to take advantage of all that extra addressing and power. Still a nice option for many projects!
the 686 version will run on all modern processors including the latest 64-bit processors.
As far as I know the i686 refers to 32 bit CPUs like the Pentium 4 family.
The 1001PX appears to contain an Intel N450 CPU which is 64 bit. From searching your laptop might only have 1GB of memory so you still probably should run a lighter weight distribution/desktop.
I wish I had TinyCore on that laptop, it's too lightweight and it can make the laptop faster (and just works). But there were lots of *choices*: for dCore x86 I found a repository for jessie (newest, but didn't work) and there was bionic, stretch, etc names I have no idea what they mean.
SliTaz didn't work either
Puppy did work as far as I can remember, but it's supposed to be a live system.
This is my laptop's info:
ASUS 1001PX ACPI BIOS Revision 0601
CPU: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N450 @ 1.66GHz
Memory:2048MB
I have also i686, not 64-bit or i386 or anything else.
I believe Debian or (probably) antiX should work on it, but I wanted a more minimal GUI system like Tiny Core. Anybody knows which release suits me?
slackware64 with fluxbox should work good. I actually have a 32bit one thread centrino with 1gig ram IBM thinkpad, and slackware 15.0 with fluxbox is quite usable on it. With 2 gig ram and two 64bit threads, should work good.
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