Linux?

[woody649]

Does anyone here know Linux? I've created a helluva mess trying to play with Linux, and I need help.

A friend was going to toss an old (2006) laptop computer that had Windows XP on it. It's a 32-bit machine with only 1 GB of RAM, so not very safe with XP and not powerful enough to upgrade to Windows 10. I told him I'd like to see if I could get it working with Linux and, if so, I'd talk to my pastor friend about finding a home for it with a family that can't afford to buy a computer.

Well, it seems no good deed shall go unpunished. I tried a half dozen or so Ubuntu-based distros, and none worked. Research then revealed that the CPU in this model is a Pentium M (says so right on the sticker), and the Pentium M doesn't play well with Linux, especially Ubuntu Linux, because of something called PAE. Also, many of the mainstream Ubuntu distros no longer support the 32-bit architecture.

So I switched to Debian and found a couple of Debian-based i386 distros that are supposed to work with the Pentium M chip. One installed but didn't run. Another installed and ran, but so slowly that crawled is the more proper term. Then I came across something called Tiny10, which is a modified Windows 10 with all the bloatware stripped out so it can run acceptably on old machinery. So I downloaded that and burned it to a DVD.

And therein lies the problem. I have the BIOS set to boot from the DVD first, USB second and then hard drive last -- but the thing ignores that, boots right past the DVD into Linux, and whatever linux is on it now is corrupted so as the boot information scrolls down the screen, EVERY step reports an error.

I need help figuring out how I can get it back to booting off the DVD so I can dump Linux and try Tiny10.