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0 pointsjabl1mo ago0 comments

AFAIU the Debian i386 port has effectively required i686 level CPU's for quite a long time (CMOV etc.)? So if he has an older CPU like the Pentium it might not work?

But otherwise, yes, Debian 12 should work fine as you say. Not so long ago I installed it on an old Pentium M laptop I had lying around. Did take some tweaking, turned out that the wifi card didn't support WPA2/3 mixed mode which I had configured on my AP, so I had to downgrade security for the experiment. But video was hopeless, it couldn't even play 144p videos on youtube without stuttering. Maybe the video card (some Intel thing, used the i915 driver) didn't have HW decoding for whatever video encoder youtube uses nowadays (AV1?), or whatever.

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UncleSlacky1mo ago

You can force YouTube to use H264 instead (via extensions like H264ify), that should reduce the processing load.

2000UltraDeluxe1mo ago

Were there actually Pentium M chipsets that could decode anything but MPEG2?

The CPU will be struggling with most modern video formats including h.264.

dmitrygr1mo ago

we were decoding 480x320 MP4 on PalmOS 5 devices in early 2000. Those were single-core in-order 200mhz ARM devices with no accelerators at all. Pentium M outperforms those easily and thus can do it too.

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jablOP1mo ago

Good point. Though too late in this particular case, since the battery was also busted, I ended up e-wasting the machine.

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