I have a Thinkpad T42 Pentium M 1.7GHz Dothan (which supposedly is PEA supported) and 512mb ddr1 with a Radeon Mobillity 7500 32mb. I've tried installing the latest Xubuntu and it didn't work because of the PEA unsupported cpu error. Odd.
What distribution would be good for me? I'm looking for something lightweight but still manageable for a linux noob. Something with decent web browsing and not too much 'bloatware' (ubuntu is overwhelming).
It will be my secondary web browsing and linux & programming learning machine.
Ive got the same processor in my old msi laptop. I run Lubuntu, runs just fine. See if you can grab another 512mb of ram though <1gb will hamper things somewhat.
ElementaryOS (is awesome) and LXLE are also worth checking out.
Be sure to use 32bit distros as well.
Once ya get going - codeblocks is a great linux ide (c, c++) that is incredible to use.
You've got a great old laptop there. Keep her going as long as you can, the keyboard is epic.
In fact, if you're in oz, I should have a working 512mb dimm somewhere. You can have it for free should I find it. Pm me.
Well, I'm dual booting Windows and Lubuntu lts on my old laptop. Granted, it's got a bit more under the hood, but seems to be from around the same time as yours and runs Lubuntu well. It's light weight but is still ubuntu under the hood, so it's stable and good for mainstream use.
As far as the non-PAE issue, Lubuntu has a work around here:
But, there's plenty of lightweight distros out there, and I'm sure more than a few will either be compatible or have a workaround for non-PAE processors. Linux Mint for example I believe has options for non-PAE processors.