Trisquel mini 4 or else

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sandandmercury
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Joined: 06/20/2010

Hi,

How can I get Trisquel 4 mini? I need to install it to an old non-PAE laptop. Or else, do you have any better idea?

Thanks!

davidnotcoulthard (not verified)
davidnotcoulthard

1. Maybe there's a non-PAE kernel that can be selected at Trisquel Mini's bootmenu? (OK probably no)
2. What do you think about using netinstall instead (I hope its ISO comes with a non-PAE kernel)?
3. You can look up "debootstraaping" on the net - wouldn't be easy, but I think it's still rather learnable.

Anyway, if you REALLY want an old version of Trisquel (please don't, though): http://oldarchive.trisquel.info/

(please note that if at any point in the future you're not able to install anything from the repository - the repos need to be changed so that it goes to http://oldarchive.trisquel.info/trisquel rather than something like http://archive.trisquel.info/trisquel .

t3g
t3g
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Joined: 05/15/2011

You probably don't want to use Trisquel 4 as it is based off of Ubuntu 10.04 and no longer has support. Have you tried a netinstall of Trisquel 6 or 7 and selected the non PAE kernel? Of course from there you can install the Trisquel Mini (LXDE) desktop.

There are other options if that doesn't work like LXLE.

ssdclickofdeath
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Joined: 05/18/2013

I had this problem a few years ago.
I took the hard drive out of the laptop I installed it on and put it in a laptop that reports PAE as a CPU feature. The first laptop actually supports PAE, but it doesn't correctly announce it as a feature. If your laptop really doesn't support PAE, then this may not work.

I then installed Trisquel 6 (the latest available then) and then installed a package called fake-pae. I swapped out the drive and it booted fine. I never tried booting it without the fake-pae package, so I don't know if it would have worked without it or not.

Here's the thread I made for reference:
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/boot-trisquel-computers-without-pae

ssdclickofdeath
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Joined: 05/18/2013

I just tested some Trisquel discs on the same laptop.
The version that didn't boot was 6.0. I was able to boot up 6.0.1 just fine. Trisquel 7 will only boot if you pass a "forcepae" boot parameter.

To do that, press F6 after choosing your language on the CD boot screen. Press escape, and you will notice the boot parameter text appear near the bottom of the screen. Select the option you want to boot into (live, install, etc.) Move the cursor to the left of the double-dash (--) and add "forcepae" to make the end of the parameters look like this: previousparameter forcepae --
Press enter, and it should start booting.

Magic Banana

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I am a translator!

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Joined: 07/24/2010

Would Trisquel's installer automatically add that boot option to the installed kernel? If not, I guess one must 'chroot' into the newly installed system (from the Live system), define GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="forcepae" in /etc/default/grub and execute 'sudo update-grub'. But I hope the installer automatically adds the options that are used to boot the Live system.

Interestingly, jxself's APT repository for Linux libre has "nonpae" kernels: https://jxself.org/linux-libre/

I believe he must know how to install Trisquel on computers that do not support PAE.

sandandmercury
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Joined: 06/20/2010

I didn't know about that distro, but I will try it anyway. They claim to be 100% free but it's not on the GNU list. (?)

sandandmercury
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Joined: 06/20/2010

Thank you very much to all of you.
Good news: the forcepae trick suggested by ssdclickofdeath works great! I think it should be explained in the download section, it may help many people. I mean, if you look for the lightweight spin of Trisquel, there is a good chance that you have a nonpae computer.
Well, thanks again!

onpon4
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Joined: 05/30/2012

> I mean, if you look for the lightweight spin of Trisquel, there is a good chance that you have a nonpae computer.

Not really. PAE was introduced in P6, sometimes referred to as "i686", which was introduced in 1995 - more than 20 years ago.

Apparently, the problem here isn't that you don't have PAE, it's that your PAE support isn't properly detected for some reason. So it could still be that this problem affects a large number of users, but it would take someone more knowledgeable about the problem to confirm whether or not that is the case.

sandandmercury
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Joined: 06/20/2010

Maybe you are right, I'm not an expert but the fact is that it did work with the "forced pae". Anyway, my intention is to rescue an old Thinkpad R51 with a Pentium M (for writing mainly). How old is it, I don't know. 15 years?

davidnotcoulthard (not verified)
davidnotcoulthard

Probably more like 10 years.

Anyway remember to disable the ATI GPU (if it's there)....somehow, if you can

Magic Banana

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Joined: 07/24/2010

Did you install Trisquel afterwards? Any problem booting the installed system?

sandandmercury
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Joined: 06/20/2010

Hi again. Sorry to say but the system is very unstable. Installation goes well but it turns very unstable when I updated the system. Apps crashes all the time and trackpad stop working. Maybe forcing pae is not a good idea after all. So sorry.

davidnotcoulthard (not verified)
davidnotcoulthard

Try to install a non-pae kernel and boot using that instead.

Magic Banana

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I am a translator!

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Joined: 07/24/2010

I would test the hardware: the disk with a SMART self-test and the RAM with memtest86+. Everything is in Trisquel's repository. To boot on memtest86+, you need the GRUB password in /etc/grub.d/01_PASSWORD (or, better, disable this useless password).