On Sat, 15 Oct 2016 14:57:14 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

snip


I'd definitely try a live MINT 17 or 18 DVD to see how it performs.

With that thought in mind and a copy of Mint 18 MATE 32 bit in front of
me I gave it another go and to my surprise, it did boot and run. I then
installed it over a copy of Ubuntu that I put on there a while back (and
wouldn't then run for some reason) and it booted ok. It also reminded me
of one of the issues I found when trying Linux on here last time (as was
mentioned in the link BM provided and that was that the touchpad needs
attention. ATM it takes a frustrating ¬18 swipes to go from top to bottom
of the screen. ;-(

This is where the fun (not) generally starts for me, trying to get the
stuff that doesn't work automagically, working without breaking
everything else.

snip

So I'm running Mint on said Toughbook now and other than applying all the
updates and installing Pan, I've done nothing else as yet (video, WiFi,
hotkeys etc all working OOTB).

Pan seems pretty sluggish but Linux feels reasonable in general (FF
launches in about 8 seconds).

Cheers, T i m