EasyOS 32-bit works on old Aspire 3681WXMi laptop
Today has been a pleasant experience. My old Acer Aspire 3681WXMi laptop has an Intel Celeron 32-bit CPU and only 512MB RAM. I bought it circa-2005. It has been in the closet for years. I booted EasyOS on a USB-stick, and got a desktop, but lots of things broken. What I discovered is that it couldn't handle the "top level zram". I disabled that, went back to the old method of direct writes to the drive (that you can do via a checkbox via "save" icon on desktop), and everything came good.
Not enough RAM to juggle the extra requirement of the zram. The laptop has a swap-partition, which is required -- I checked and saw that it was being used.
Audio works, wi-fi works. Connected to the Internet, Firefox works and is surprisingly snappy. LibreOffice works, also surprisingly snappy. Really, this has given this old laptop a new lease of life.
Next up, I plan to put detection of RAM less than 1GB and automatically turn off "top level zram".
So, what are the lower-end specs that will work? I don't know if Easy will work lower than 512MB RAM, so set that as the minimum. The CPU needs to be 32-bit i686 -- 486/586 CPU is no good. The expansion bus needs to be PCI -- the predecessor is the ISA bus, and the kernel will not work with that.
I compiled the kernel, 5.15.57, for a single-core CPU, supporting 4GB RAM maximum. Also disabled EFI support in the kernel -- this is for BIOS computers only.