What distro to revive a 32-bit non-UEFI laptop?
 

This is my first thread here, hi everyone!

I have some old Asus 1001PX which is 32-bit and has no UEFI just lying around there. It originally used to run Windows 7 starter and I switched it to a VERY old version of Linux Mint (probably version 11) which I found somewhere. I was looking for whether there is a "modern" distro that can work on it, but despite ones like Alpine or Bodhi who have images for the x86 system exist they work only for UEFI systems. If I made a bootable disk out of one of them the BIOS won't detect it on my machine. :(

Does anyone know some newer distro to work with this? I know there's Gentoo which has compatibility with pretty much any hardware, but I just want some "just worksy" one.

Thanks in advance!

Debian still releases a 32 bit image I believe. LXDE or XFCE should run just fine. Debian works with or without UEFI so pick your poison.

Debian and Slackware both released 32-bit installers with their latest releases (Debian 12 and Slackware 15) and will support BIOS installs. Depending on your available memory you will probably want to install a lighter-weight desktop, like LXDE or LXQT.

Edit to add: Debian 32-bit only supports i686 CPUs with Bookworm, if that is an issue you can try the previous stable release, which is still fairly "modern".

Also have a look at MX or antix.

FYI: the 686 version will run on all modern processors including the latest 64-bit processors. IT just fails to take advantage of all that extra addressing and power. Still a nice option for many projects!

As far as I know the i686 refers to 32 bit CPUs like the Pentium 4 family.
The 1001PX appears to contain an Intel N450 CPU which is 64 bit. From searching your laptop might only have 1GB of memory so you still probably should run a lighter weight distribution/desktop.

More options - Devuan - SliTaz - Tiny Core Linux

(Also, the BSDs should still have 32bit versions) :)

I wish I had TinyCore on that laptop, it's too lightweight and it can make the laptop faster (and just works). But there were lots of *choices*: for dCore x86 I found a repository for jessie (newest, but didn't work) and there was bionic, stretch, etc names I have no idea what they mean.

SliTaz didn't work either :(

Puppy did work as far as I can remember, but it's supposed to be a live system.

This is my laptop's info:

ASUS 1001PX ACPI BIOS Revision 0601
CPU: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N450 @ 1.66GHz
Memory:2048MB

I have also i686, not 64-bit or i386 or anything else.

I believe Debian or (probably) antiX should work on it, but I wanted a more minimal GUI system like Tiny Core. Anybody knows which release suits me?

Instruction set 64

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us...-1-66-ghz.html

slackware64 with fluxbox should work good. I actually have a 32bit one thread centrino with 1gig ram IBM thinkpad, and slackware 15.0 with fluxbox is quite usable on it. With 2 gig ram and two 64bit threads, should work good.

Well that's kinda weird that my processor is 64 bits despite the Linux Mint already installed there is 32...

Anyway, I'll try out Slackware (the distro with no package manager as some call it), should be fine whether with 32 or 64 bits.

Thanks! :D

Intel/AMD CPUs are backwards compatible. 32 bit OSs will still run.