I have a laptop with a pentium M here that I want for something. Has a X800 in it so I dunno, CS:S and runescape? Something... But I want a linux on it. Any ideas?
I was thinking Manjaro but there might be something better out there.
Manjaro is pretty good and it doesn’t depend so much on which distro Ubuntu, Manjaro, Red hat, pure Arch but more on the Desktop environment. I would say stick to something light weight like openbox, Lxde,i3, and maybe xfce. One of these desktop environments should suffice and still make your system run pretty quick.
Single core is going to be fun. Debian minimal install + Xorg + a light WM?
IMO a full DE is just going to waste resources
Pentium M does not have PAE, so you have to find a distro that doesn't require it, which most 32bit distros do.
See my "Why in the World" thread on the Pentium M. Short story is its a Pentium 3 with SSE2 and 3 and PAE is there, but it isn't turned on. It was made useable, but never standard because they wanted to keep the costs down.
Pentium M's are bitchen retro computers, but yeah they are a strange duck.
Damn Small Linux or Puppy
There used to be a non PAE flavor of Debian, but I didnt see it when I made a cursory look a few minutes ago.
I'd go Debian if it's available
You can always run Gentoo, stage 1 the bitch from a chroot on whatever supports it.
Ew gentoo? Ugh god no. I'll use gentoo on something that needs it manjaro is doing fine :P