Mint on Thinkpad T42

[turboscrew]

Which is the latest recommendable mint release for Thinkpad T42 (Pemtium M)?
Does fake PAE work fine?
Any other hardware problems expected?

I've been running Mint 13 MATE, but I seem to have problems with a RTOS debugging in virtual machine.
Many SW packets are quite old and they don't seem to work fully, like I got Virtualbox to work and even the debugger
to show, but I '--dbg' nor environment variable setting didn't work. I had to edit the xml.
The problem is that there doesn't seem to be a proper manual about the debugger around.

Then I tried qemu, but Aqemu or qemu-launcher doesn't work, and I haven't found a way to get a window open for the
console output. In ubuntu that worked immediately and automatically (on another machine, and there were other Ubuntu-specific problems).

So I wondered if I should search around to find out how (and where) to install this and that, or should I upgrade my Mint release. The problem is that Mint 17 is using PAE kernel, and probably most SW packages (if it has an effect) are probably built for PAE-kernel. Especially I'm worried about virtual machines.

[turboscrew]

For info to others too.

From ubuntu forums:

Pentium M has PAE capability, it only lacks the PAE flag. Therefore it is possible to use fake-PAE.

[turboscrew]

Has anyone any experience if Mint 17 + MATE is too heavy?
How about xfce?
How well do programming tools, like eclipse, work with xfce?