Does anyone here speak Linux?

[woody649]

I have created a disaster. No excuses -- I did it. I've dug myself into a hole and I can't find a way out.

A friend who works in IT for a large hospital used to be an independent computer systems vendor. He cleaned out his basement recently, and gave me an old (2007) Asus laptop rather than toss it in the trash.It had Windows XP on it, and my hope was to switch it to Linux and make it usable for some poor family that can't afford a newer, fancier computer. (Although this was a fairly high-end laptop when new).

It's a 32-bit cpu, so that limits the current distros of Linux that can be used. I made installation DVDs for a few and tried them all. Next problem: this particular computer uses a Pentium M cpu, and the Pentium M doesn't support "PAE" (whatever that is), and most Linux flavors apparently need PAE.

But there are a couple of Debian distros that will (supposedly) work without PAE, so I tried a couple. Got one installed, but it ran so slowly that it was unusable. Installed another, but it won't boot -- as the boot sequence scrolls down the screen virtually every entry reports an error.

Then I found something called Tiny10, which is a stripped-down version of Windows 10. It's available in 32-bit and it should run on an i386 CPU with 1 GB of RAM. So I downloaded that and burned a DVD.

But ... the Linux installation somehow overrides the BIOS and won't boot from the DVD. Even with the DVD in the drive, it tries to boot into Linux ... which won't run.

Does anyone have any idea how I can fix this so I can boot into the Tiny10 installation DVD?