Have you considered trying BDI4emc ? The last time I tried bdi it was running on a Morphix live cd. Information on it's current state is hard to find but it is an active project afaik. What follows is partly guess work.
bdi is a complete distribution instead of a collection of packages. Based on the stable branch of Debian(?) It's a standard install cd as opposed to live.
The emc is not emc2. emc2 and axis can be installed according to the linuxcnc.org wiki. The instructions are a bit old so there may be new issues.
Running bdi will at least give you some idea how well realtime performs on that laptop.
Anyone who says "It only goes together one way" has no imagination.